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English Childhood 



By 



A. CHARLES BABENROTH, Ph. D. 




COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH 
AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 






ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

Columbia University 
New York 



SALES AGENTS 

LONDON 

HUMPHREY MILFORD 
Amen Corner, E.C. 



SHANGHAI 

EDWARD EVANS & SONS, Ltd. 
30 North Szechuen Road 



English Childhood 

Wordsworth's Treatment of Childhood 
in the Light of EngHsh Poetry 

from 
Prior to Crabbe 



By 

aV CHARLES BABENROTH 



Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements 

for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the 

Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1922 






Copyright, 1922 
By Columbia University Press 



Printed from type. Published December, 1922 



NORTHWESTERN PUBLISHING HOUSE 
MILWAUKEE, WIS.. U. S. A. 



TO 
MY SON DONALD 



PREFACE 

The following essays are based on a dissertation pre- 
sented for the doctorate in Columbia University. The aim 
has been to present Wordsworth's rather extensive body of 
poetry on childhood in its true perspective against the back- 
ground of eighteenth-century poetry. 

In addition to many detached poems on childhood I have 
used innumerable interesting lines imbedded in poems on 
subjects remotely or not at all connected with childhood. 
Such incidental lines, in addition to their occasional charm, 
are essential for an understanding of the attitude of poets 
of the eighteenth century toward childhood. 

I owe thanks to the Librarian of Columbia University 
and to Miss Mudge of the library staff for assistance in 
procuring books and manuscripts; to my wife, for careful 
reading of proof; to Professor W. P. Trent and Professor 
E. H. Wright, who read several of the essays ; and es- 
pecially to Professor C. S. Baldwin, who read the entire 
manuscript and made constructive suggestions of inesti- 
mable value. 

The essays had their inception in the English Seminar 
conducted by Professor Ashley Horace Thorndike, whose 
wide scholarship has been at the same time an inspiration 
and an invaluable guide in shaping the discussion of the 
large body of material which represents the accumulated 
effort of a century on the subject of childhood. To him I 
am deeply grateful for countless suggestions, always pa- 
tiently and kindly given. 

A. C. B. 
New York, 
November 7, 1922. 
vii 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction i 

I. In Our Infancy 15 

II. The Growing Boy 50 

III. Children of the Poor 97 

IV. Education 161 

V. Children's Books 219 

VI. William Blake 262 

VII. William Wordsworth 299 

Index 397 



ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

INTRODUCTION 

The aim in the following chapters is to study Words- 
worth's treatment of childhood in the light of English poetry 
from Matthew Prior to George Crabbe. For a true appre- 
ciation of Wordsworth's attitude it is essential to know 
the place of childhood in the poetry of the eighteenth century. 

It is not the intention to review juvenile literature. The 
object is not to evaluate poetry composed by children or for 
them. No peculiar value is attached to the precocious verse 
of Pope, Chatterton, or Wordsworth himself. In fact, un- 
less their precocious verse incorporates lines on childhood, 
it has no place within the limits of this study. 

In the eighteenth century may be observed the beginnings 
of many modern conceptions in poetry as well as in politics, 
theology, education, and social welfare. This is especially 
true with respect to interest in childhood. In order to 
understand the poet's treatment of childhood in an age of 
changing values, it is necessary to take into account various 
influences that made themselves felt in the lives and thoughts 
of English men and women as well as in English poetry. 
Earliest of these is Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning 
Education, which persists as a moulding force throughout 
the century wherever the education of children is discussed. 
Shaftesbury's Characteristics is a definite influence from 
Thomson to Wordsworth. After the middle of the century 
there are traces, often tangible, of ideas which derive from 
Rousseau's Entile; and the effects of Revolutionary specu- 
lation and social philosophy on the conceptions of Blake 



2 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

are obvious in his poems about children. The industrial 
revolution, moreover, offered new problems with regard to 
child labor, problems akin to those noticed in poetry as 
early as John Dyer's The Fleece. The problem, then, is not 
merely literary. In so far as poets have touched upon 
education and social welfare it will be helpful for an un- 
derstanding of their aims to observe the conflict between 
old and new forces, and the emergence of modern concep- 
tions in the schools and in the attitude of the public toward 
children. 

Certain themes that are prominent in Wordsworth 
emerge faintly at first in the work of minor poets who are 
seldom read now except by students of literature. These 
ignes minores, in whose poetry there is not often grandeur 
or height, indicate more or less clearly the changes that 
took place in life and in poetry. The student can not, like 
Bums, pass by "hunders nameless" poets and versifiers who 
imitated their betters, but who prepared the way at the same 
time for inspired poets like Blake and Wordsworth. Their 
poetry is vital in a study that reflects forces which ultimate- 
ly brought about epoch-making changes in the attitude of 
men towards children in the home, in the school, and in 
industry. 



Although no hard-and-fast delimitation of the years that 
constitute childhood is necessary for the purpose of this 
study, it will be helpful to observe the ages of children as 
stated by men of letters themselves. Age is sometimes 
specifically noted in the title, as in Prior's To A Child of 
Quality (Hve years old, 1704, the author then forty). More 
often the poet merely alludes to the child's age, with the 
result that it is difficult to determine the exact boundaries 
set for infancy, childhood, or youth. Cowper's To My 



INTRODUCTION 3 

Cousin Anne Bodham recalls her as no more 'Than play- 
thing for a nurse" ; she was "A kitten both in size and glee." 
While comparing the ages of children in The Excursion 
(III, 592-94), Wordsworth states thait there was 

no wider interval of time 
Between their several births than served for one 
To establish something of a leader's sway. 

The line between infancy and childhood is usually vaguely 
suggested, as in The Excursion, by stating that the boy had 
''overpast the sinless age." Beattie is not specific in the 
prefatory remarks to The Minstrel: his "design was to trace 
the progress of a Poetical Genius, born in a rude age, from 
the first dawning of fancy and reason till that period at 
which he may be supposed capable of appearing in the 
world as a Minstrel." 

The paragraphs of Isaac Watts in the first half and those 
of Rousseau after the middle of the century make it pos- 
sible to construct a schedule of ages. For Watts the years 
up to four constituted infancy; from four to eight, early 
childhood; from eight to twelve, childhood; and after that, 
youth. Rousseau carried infancy to the fifth year; child- 
hood to the twelfth ; boyhood to the fifteenth ; and youth to 
the twentieth year. 

In Birth and Education of Genius, James Cawthorn ap- 
proximates Watts's age of four as closing the period of 
infancy : 

And Genius now 'twixt three and four, 
Phoebus, according to the rule, 
Resolved to send his son to school. 

Wordsworth, on the other hand, holds closer to Rousseau's 
age of five: at the age when Luke carried in his cheeks 
"Two steady roses that were five years old," Michael first 



4 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

made a shepherd's staff for him. Aaron Hill's The Dis- 
tinction of Ages had carried the first period up to the seventh 
year: 

The seven first years of life (man's break of day). 
Gleams of short sense, a dawn of thought display. 

The ninth year was frequently chosen as the close of 
childhood. Swift states in the Modest Proposal: *T have 
no children by which I can propose to get a single penny, 
the youngest being nine years old." Richardson wrote in 
Clarissa Harlozve: "She never was left out of any party of 
pleasure after she had passed her ninth year." In one of 
the numerous letters in which he shows a true fatherly 
tenderness for his son Philip Stanhope, Chesterfield reminds 
the boy of his ninth birthday, after which he will no longer 
be a child. Wordsworth is less precise in The Prelude. He 
speaks of himself as "a child not nine years old," and many 
of his recollections cluster about the period between nine 
and ten in phrases like "Ere I had told ten birthdays," "twice 
five summers," and "twice five years or less." In Michael 
the tenth year marks a period ; at that age, when Luke was 
"full ten years old" and was able to stand against the moun- 
tain blasts, Michael and his son were companions. 

Although it is clear that they were using the word 
"childhood" without strict regard for age, there is no real 
inconsistency among poets in their notice of these varying 
ages as markers of infancy and childhood. Modern child 
psychology holds that "childhood is usually considered to 
cover the period between infancy and puberty, or, roughly, 
between the ages of 3 and 12" ; but it also recognizes an 
overlapping of periods when tests are applied to determine 
physical, emotional, or intellectual development.^ In the 

^ A Cyclopedia of Education, edited by Paul Monroe, s. v. 
"Child Psychology." 



INTRODUCTION 5 

lines recalling his boyhood friend, Wordsworth felt free 
to change the reading of 1805, "ere he was ten years old", to 

This boy was taken from his mates, and died 

In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old. ^ 

While discussing charity children in his History of the 
Poor (1793), Thomas Ruggles seems to suggest that thir- 
teen or fourteen was considered the close of childhood, at 
which time the boy was expected to go to work. Mickle 
refers to this transition in Commodore Johnstone : 

As childhood closed, thy ceaseless toils began, 
And toils and dangers ripened thee to man. 

Transition seems to be indicated by Aaron Hill in The Dis- 
tinction of Ages: 

When fourteen springs have bloomed his downy cheek, 
His soft and blushful meanings learn to speak. 

In Ecclesiastical Sonnets (III, 23) Wordsworth gives 
solemn expression to his regret that childhood can not be 
extended beyond the age of Confirmation. 

The Young-ones gathered in from hill and dale. 

With holiday delight on every brow : 

'Tis past away ; far other thoughts prevail ; 

For they are taking the baptismal Vow 

Upon their conscious selves; their own lips speak 

The solemn promise. Strongest sinews fail. 

And many a blooming, many a lovely, cheek 

Under the holy fear of God turns pale; 

While on each head his lawn-robed servant lays 

An apostolic hand, and with prayer seals 

1 See There zvas a Boy (1798), in Knight, Poems of William 
Wordsworth, Macmillan, 1896, vol. II, page 58, footnote. 



6 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The Covenant. The Omnipotent will raise 
Their feeble Souls; and bear with hi'- regrets, 
Who, looking round the fair assemblage, feels 
That ere the Sun goes down their childhood sets. ^ 

II 

Although the lines of Catullus, Martial, and Horace on 
childhood are echoed in English poetry from Ben Jonson 
to Pope and Gray, the limits of this study forbid even a 
brief survey of childhood as it is noted in the Greek and 
Latin literatures. It would, likewise, be i^^^ossible to do 
justice to memorable passages in the Oi ^"'^"" 

Testament, and to the many beautiful m .jiics ui 

the Virgin and Child, the spirit of which is more or less 
faithfully preserved in such anonymous songs of universal 
appeal to the mother heart as My Sweet Sweeting, or Lully, 
lulla, thou little tiny child, and the homely lyric 

Fayre maydyn, who is this barn, 
That thou beriste in thyn arme? 

Neither does space allow even a glance at childhood as it is 
frequently noticed elsewhere in Middle English literature, 
for example in the Brome miracle play Abraham and Isaac, 
in Chaucer's penetrating lines, and in the Popular Ballads. 

1 Compare The Act, The Preservation of the Health and Morals 
of Apprentices and Others Employed in Cotton and Other Mills, 
and Cotton and Other Factories : June 22, 1802. One hour each 
Sunday should be given to teaching the Christian religion, and Con- 
firmation should take place between the fourteenth and eighteenth 
years. It seems clear that Confirmation has been delayed beyond the 
usual age of twelve or fourteen, probably because of industrial' 
abuses of child labor. Schedule C of the Act, for better regulation 
of parish poor children within bills of mortality, passed in 1766, 
shows that children were at work as early as the age of six. It 
specifies : "Where sent if past Six Years of Age, and in what work 
employed." 



INTRODUCTION 7 

It is, however, n'=^cessary to glance at the poetry of the 
seventeenth century. The appealing child lyrics in the 
period from the Earl of Surrey's The Age of Children 
Happiest to Henry Vaughan's The Retreate have no paral- 
lels at the close oi the seventeenth century. 

Surrey's pensive mood does not prevent a frankly human 
approach to his subject. Sir Philip Sidney's Child-Song 
is not colored by moral or theological intentions : Sidney's 
attitude toward the infant who can not sleep, although his 
mother sings to,, him, is almost whimsical and, certainly, 
human. Nichola|>I Breton's A Sweet Lullaby with rare 
grace and •' ^(depicts a mother tenderly singing to her 

child about the lather who "false is fled away." Robert 
Greene's Sephestia's Song to Her Child (from Menuphon) 
has all the charm, tender humanity, and lilt of Elizabethan 
lyrics on childhood. 

Much of the charm of these lyrics survives in Jonson's 
child poems, which, however, begin to show traces of new 
literary methods characteristic of the classicist school. 
Although his lyrics reveal a conscious striving for formal 
beauty, Jonson is still close to the Elizabethan mood. His 
lines On My First Daughter, On My First Son, and An 
Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy breathe true parental tenderness. 
In these poems the personal attitude allows the expression 
of genuine sentiments. The last line of the poem on his 
daughter echoes a classical convention, but the father's heart 
is in the poem. For so genuine an expression of parental 
grief as is found in the lines On My First Son, the reader 
of poetry must wait more than one hundred years after 
Jonson. ^ 

1 Compare On the Loss of an Only Son Robert Marquis of Nor- 
manhy, by John Sheffield Duke of Buckinghamshire. 



8 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Several of Robert Herrick's lyrics combine with the 
exquisite form of Jonson's poems a sympathetic insight 
not to be found in verse at the close of the century. The 
form and diction of his Epitaph Upon A Child and Upon A 
Child that Dyed recall his master Jonson. A Grace for A 
Child is characterized by spontaneous simplicity/ Her- 
rick's To His Saviour, A Child; A Present, By A Child, 
without losing sight of the human child, adds something of 
the mystic fervor and spiritual suggestion common in the 
most inspired passages on childhood in the seventeenth 
century. This element had already appeared in the well 
known Burning Babe of Southwell. The most exalted ex- 
pression of the mystic longing for childhood days and 
moods is found in Henry Vaughan's The Retreate. 

Happy those early days when I 

Shined in my angel-infancy. 

Before I understood this place 

Appointed for my second race, 

Or taught my soul to fancy aught 

But a white, celestial thought; 

When yet I had not walked above 

A mile or two from my first love. 

And looking back — at that short space — 

Could see a glimpse of His bright face. . . . 

With these immortal lines should be associated the para- 
graph penned by Bishop Earle in his Microcosmographie : 
"A child is a man in a small letter. His soul is yet a white 
paper unscribbled with observations of the world. . . . 

1 Here a little child I stand, 
Heaving up my either hand; 
Cold as paddocks though they be, 
Here I lift them up to thee, 
For a benizon to fall 
On our meat, and on us all. Amen. 



INTRODUCTION V 

He is purely happy, because he knows no evil. . . . Hee 
kisses and loves all. And, when the smart of the rod is 
past, smiles on his bearer. The elder hee grows hee is a 
staire lower from God. 'Hee is the Christian's example, 
and the old man's relapse. The one imitates his pureness, 
the other his simplicity. Could hee put off his body with 
his little coat, hee had got eternitie without a burthen, and 
exchanged but one Heaven for another." 

On the one hand lyrics of the Elizabethan age give 
frankly human and vigorous expression to themes from 
childhood, while on the other the deep insight of Vaughan 
and Herrick clothes in tender lines their sense of ''some- 
thing more" than physical reality. Childhood in the sense 
of the Elizabethan singers and their followers, who in 
Vaughan carried interpretation to its highest spiritual pos- 
sibilities, disappears from English poetry until in the eigh- 
teenth century those sentimental poets who prepared the 
way for Wordsworth take up the theme again haltingly. 

In Crashaw's Holy Nativity of Our Lord, the shepherds 
are named Tityrus and Thyrsis. Milton's On the Morning 
of Christ's Nativity contains allusions to Cynthia, Apollo, 
and Delphos, and On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of 
a Cough to Jove, Elysian fields, and Olympus. In these 
poems the tendency away from direct observation of chil- 
dren and toward classical embellishment is as clear as in 
Herrick's The Wounded Cupid. This poem reveals those 
delightful toyings with the pagan Cupid which were to 
dominate classicist complimentary verse ostensibly written 
on the theme of childhood. 

The education of the age was thoroughly classical. The 
poets most studied, quoted, and imitated were those of 
Greece and Rome. While exalting the classical standard, 
men of letters restricted themselves largely to the methods 



10 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

employed by Horace and Virgil. In imitating these poets, 
they aimed to use subject-matter susceptible of treatment in 
the manner which they considered classical.^ 

Poets of this school seldom show a vital conception of 
childhood. Waller felt it necessary to justify his use of 
English in the epitaph on the only son of Lord Andover; 
and in a poem On English Verse he writes that poets who 
seek a lasting reputation must carve in Latin or Greek. 
It is hardly to be expected that poetry conceived in such a 
mood will reveal a lively appreciation of children. Waller's 
approach was artificial when he wrote that in the starry 
night fond children cry for *'the rich spangles that adorn 
the sky." His favorite choice of theme and development 
is typically illustrated in St. James Park. Children do 
not appear in the one hundred and fifty lines of the poem; 
but a thousand cupids ride the billows. The poem repre- 
sents a conception in which human childhood can have no 
part. The subject is embroidered with classicalities be- 
cause the gallant poet is interested in fine compliments. 
Only cupids, the spies of Thetis, are of use to him. 

Abraham Cowley, who helped prepare the way for Dry- 
den, and enjoyed a reading public deep into the eighteenth 
century, also reveals tendencies that carried poets away from 
the Elizabethan tradition. As his classical attainments are 
closely bound up with his school life, he has enshrined 
the memory of his teacher, Mr. Jordan, second master at 
Westminster. The master's virtues, his great store of 
learning, and his simple character are discerned with difficul- 

1 In The Complete English Gentleman Defoe satirizes classi- 
calities: "Not an author writes a pamphlet, not a poet a copy of 
verses, no, not to his mistress, tho she knows nothing of the matter, 
but he draws a bill upon Horace or Virgil or some of the old 
chiming train, and talks as familiarly of them as if they had been 
brought up together." 



INTRODUCTION 11 

ty among generalizations and elaborations. The unwilling- 
ness of the classicists to treat childhood in terms of common 
observation, and their imitation of the style and diction of 
Latin literature, are clearly indicated in the artificial Happy 
Birth of the Duke, in which the child is the occasion rather 
than the subject of the poem. There is a clumsy echo like 
this: 

Time, which devours 
Its own sons, will be glad and proud of yours. 

Stilted phrases mar the effusion, which might have been 
phrased as a poem of simple, unaflFected childhood, for 
Cowley, as private secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria 
during her exile, was intimately acquainted with those to 
whom the poem is addressed. 

Dryden's most appealing lines on childhood recall at 
times the happy phrasing of Jonson, as in the Pastoral Elegy 
on the Death of Amyntas and Death of a Very Young 
Gentleman. His beautiful lines in the latter poem reveal 
the growing tendency to treat the child in terms of man- 
hood. The custom of magnifying the helpless infant into 
the stature of a man, in part explained by the particular 
subject, is manifest in certain lines of Britannia Rediviva. 

"Poetic diction" is in itself, as an ideal of elegance, un- 
favorable to the portrayal of childhood. Addison's Princess 
of Wales indicates how childhood serves merely as a point 
of departure for strained compliments. The general re- 
liance on conventional imagery is obvious in a poem ad- 
dressed to the House of Nassau by John Hughes, who 
echoes the same classical parallel Dry den had employed in 
his lines to the Stuarts. 'Addison's Campaign is a typical 
illustration of the way childhood was noticed to heighten 
eflfect in panegyrical verse. John Philipps's Blenheim reads 
like an unconscious satire of the type. In the passage in 



12 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

which Philipps depicts infant suffering to heighten the 
destructiveness of war, the situation is generaHzed and the 
lines are crowded with pretentious phrases. 

where cities stood, 
Well-fenced and numerous, desolation reigns 
And emptiness : dismayed, unfed, unhoused, 
The widow and the orphan stroll around 
The desert wide; with oft retorted eye 
They view the gaping walls and poor remains 
Of mansions once their own, (now loathsome haunts 
Of birds obscene), bewailing loud the loss 
Of spouse, or sire, or son, ere manly prime, 
Slain in sad conflict, and complain of Fate 
As partial and too rigorous, nor find 
Where to retire themselves, or whence appease 
The afflictive keen desire for food, exposed 
To winds and storms and jaws of savage beasts. 

In the mood of the classicists, childhood was a period to 
be rapidly passed over. Like Dryden, Pope also employs 
the rapid generalized summary of infancy and childhood.^ 
Until he reaches the state of manhood in his summary, Pope 
is not interested in details. The first two lines rapidly 
carry the reader over the period of infancy, and the couplet 
on childhood is noncommittal as to details. 

Pope's Messiah was written in imitation of Virgil's Pol- 
lio. References to infancy are uninspired. In Pope's lines 
the child becomes an ^'auspicious babe" and ''smiling in- 
fant" who will play with the "crested basilisk and speckled 
snake." It will look with pleasure upon the "green lustre" 
of the scales, and will innocently play with the "forky 
tongue." Such elaborated accessories are out of harmony 

1 The classicists were undoubtedly indebted to a passage in 
Horace's Ars Poetica for this. See Roscommon's translation. But 
note also the speech of Jaques in As You Like It. — Essay on Man. 



INTRODUCTION 13 

with childhood.^ In fact, Pope was temperamentally noft 
fitted for the task of phrasing such a situation with Old 
Testament simplicity. Homely surroundings were not con- 
genial to his powers. "He had been at his best in the 
speeches of the Iliad, and groaned heavily over the homely 
scenes in Ithaca." Wordsworth cited Pope's Messiah as 
an illustration of reprehensible diction. 

Certain passages in John Gay's Trivia (1716) reveal a 
close approach to realistic observation of childhood. Yet 
even here Gay finds it necessary to use the machinery of 
classical mythology. He traces the parentage and "secret 
rise" of the "sable race" known as London bootblacks. 
While writing of the "tide whose sable streams beneath the 
city glide" he elaborates the legend of the goddess Cloacina. 
She fell in love with a London streetsweeper and gave birth 
to a child who "through various risks, in years improved." 
Then follows a brief account of the first years in the life of 
a London waif, with minute details of Holborn life, which 
as far as they go rival in vividness the circumstantial ac- 
count in Defoe's Colonel Jacques. The little waif's mother 
finally persuades the gods to take the foundling's part and to 
teach him a useful trade. Diana furnishes a brush made of 
the "strong bristles of the mighty boar." The god of day 
provides a tripod "amid the crowded way to raise the dirty 
foot." Neptune contributes "fetid oil pressed from the 
enormous whale," and Vulcan "aids with soot the new 
japanning art." As Cloacina descends at sunrise, she finds 
the "sturdy lad" musing over Holborn's "black canal of 
mud," and bemoaning his lack of father and mother. The 
goddess mother soothes him and directs him in the em- 
ployment of the gifts of the gods. 

^ Compare William Thompson's The Nativity (1736) and The 
Magi: A Sacred Eclogue for similar treatment. 



14 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The fine attitude of Elizabethan singers, and the gentle 
mysticism of poets like Vaughan, are not to be found in 
those poets who adhered to the school of Dryden and Pope. 
During the first half of the eighteenth century, poetry was 
largely didactic, satiric, and rational, so that little place was 
found for children and the parental emotions for them. 
Parents have always loved and observed their children, and 
this affectionate regard has been expressed in poetry from 
the time of Homer's Astyanax. Very rarely, however, be- 
fore the close of the eighteenth century have children seized 
upon the poetic imagination. The great movements in 
thought and emotion which stirred the century tended more 
and more to direct attention to the child. This attention was 
both reflected and stimulated by the poets whose verse is the 
subject of this study. 



CHAPTER I 

IN OUR INFANCY 

In tracing the changes which took place in the poets' 
attitude toward infants and very young children, it is not 
essential to take into account a very large number of lines 
imbedded in poems on subjects not connected with child- 
hood. Such incidental references do not as a rule indicate 
that the poet is writing of childhood in a sympathetic mood 
or with his eye on the individual child. Sometimes there 
is a charming glimpse which the lover of children is not 
willing to forget, as in John Philipps's Cyder, where chil- 
dren are momentarily noticed while they are gathering cow- 
slips. Occasionally, as in the satirical lines of Prior and 
Lloyd, side glances to childhood are lively and enjoyable.^ 
Most often, however, they are mechanical and serve merely 
as more or less colorless examples to illustrate patly a point 
which the poet wishes to emphasize. ^ For a right un- 

1 Compare Cowper's charming lines On Obsewing some Names 
of little Note recorded in the Biographia Britannica: 

So when a child, as playful children use, 
Has burnt to tinder a stale last year's news, 
The flame extinct, he views the roving fire — 
There goes my lady, and there goes the squire; 
There goes the parson, oh ! illustrious spark, 
And there, scarce less illustrious, goes the clerk. 

2 Langhorne has been discussing innate ideas, and makes his 
point ("No innate knowledge on the soul impressed") in the lines: 

See the pleased infant court the flaming brand, 
Eager to grasp the glory in its hand. 

(Enlargement of the Mind) 
Samuel Boyse's Hope's Farewell is colorless : 

The joys you gave my youth to taste 
Were but like children's toys at best. 



16 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

derstanding of the fundamental chang-e which took place 
during the eighteenth century in the poets' treatment of 
very young children, it will be necessary to observe poems 
in which the child is specifically the subject. 

The detached poem was suggested usually by the child's 
birth, birthday, or death; but some of the most successful 
poems are not associated with special occasions. Before 
the middle of the century, poets as a rule addressed them- 
selves to children of quality, and were interested in child- 
hood rather than in the individual. During and after the 
sixties, the democratization of poetry is reflected in the in- 
creasing number of poems on children not connected with 
the nobility or the royal household. It will be noted that 
during the closing decades of the century the poet is occu- 
pied not merely with childhood, but also with the child. 
Although it is inevitable that in all these poems the child 
should be closely associated with his father and mother, 
special attention will be given to the poet's willingness and 
ability to observe the child as an individual being. 

Among the writers of occasional verse in the early 
eighteenth century. Prior alone is regularly remembered by 
compilers of anthologies of children's verse. His charm- 
ing poems reveal a delightful urbanity and lightness of 
touch that make him a master of vers de societe. He 
shows perfect command of the adroitly turned compliment. 
If the study of childhood in poetry were extended to in- 
clude the poetic use of Cupid, it would be rewarding to con- 
sider Prior's sensuous realization of this pagan god, who 
frequently is a lively actor in the poems addressed to Chloe. 
The poet's conception of the young god is so vivid that he 
portrays him as sobbing before his mother Venus in childish 



IN OUR INFANCY 17 

accents. To My Lord Biickhurst (very ^yoiing, playing 
ivith a cat) shows Prior's charming treatment of the god 
of love^ and is as dainty in conception and phrasing as his 
effusions to Chloe. 

The posthumously pubHshed To A Child of Quality 
(five years old, 1704, the author then forty) is too well 
known to need comment. Study of the poem reveals that 
only three stanzas are addressed to the child as a child. 
In the four closing stanzas she is treated as a girl and 
young woman. Prior in his most sprightly manner con- 
trasts his age with her youth. He may write only until 
she can spell ; and he gives point to his feigned regret by 
observing that their different ages are ordained to move so 
that he will be ''past making love" 

When she begins to comprehend it. 

It is a frankly artful effusion. The child of quality is not 
so much the subject as the occasion of the poem. Prior 
expresses his middle-age interest in the child of quality, not 
by portraying an individual child but by assuming an air 
of playful gallantry.^ 

Although more didactic, A Letter (to the Honourable 
Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley, zvhen a child) is writ- 
ten with a closer approach to the child spirit. The poem 
lacks the delicate weaving of his other pieces, but in its 
headlong tumble of rhythm reflects the merry Prior who, 
we are told, delighted to be the carefree companion of chil- 
dren. And no doubt he succeeded in convincing children of 
his genuineness, as Peggy's later tribute, after she had 
become Duchess of Portland, indicates: "he made himself 

1 Compare Ernest Bernbaum, English Poets of the Eighteenth 
Century, p. xxi. 



18 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

beloved by every living thing in the house — master, child, 
servant, human creature or animal." ^ 

The Female Phaeton was a favorite of that modern 
singer of child lyrics, Swinburne, who called it the "most 
adorable of nursery idylls that ever was or will be." It is a 
rollicking ballad that gives no certain clue as to the age of 
Kitty. Vain Kitty is inflamed with a ''little" rage at being 
confined with Abigails and holy books while Jenny tastes 
the sweets of society. She wishes to "quit the score" with 
proud Jenny by making all her lovers fall. The closing 
stanzas show all Prior's verve and lightheartedness together 
with the finality of phrase of which he was master : 

Fondness prevailed, mamma gave way; 
Kitty, at heart's desire, 
Obtained the chariot for a day. 
And set the world on fire. 

The charm of Prior's child poems lies in the make-believe of 
the adult who can unbend far enough to enter into the spirit 
of children and who brings courtly compliment, classical 
reminiscence, and afifectionate admiration, all in homage to 

1 Prior's Alma contains lively similitudes: 

For as young children, who are tied in 

Go-carts, to keep their steps from sliding, 

When members knit, and legs grow stronger. 

Make use of such machine no longer, 

But leap pro libitu, and scout 

On horse called hobby, or without, 

Thus each should down with all he thinks, 

As boys eat bread to fill up chinks. 
Unlike his poems inspired by children of quality, these lines re- 
flect middle-class child life as he might have observed it in such 
a home as that of the common soldier and his wife in Long Acre, 
noticed by Johnson when he remarked upon Prior's willingness to 
descend to mean company after an evening with Bolingbroke, Pope, 
and Swift. 



IN OUR INFANCY 19 

the child of quality. Prior's poems represent neo-classicist 
poetry doing its very prettiest for the infant and young child. 

Ambrose Philips phrased fine compliments to children 
of his patrons, but was so unfortunate as to bring down 
upon himself the nickname "Namby Pamby." The term, 
according to Mr. Gosse, was first used by Henry Carey, 
author of Sally in Our Alley, in a parody mentioned by 
Swift in 1725.^ Known largely through the contemptuous 
remarks of his greater contemporary, Pope, Phihps is at a 
disadvantage with his modern reader : "Gay is writing tales 
for Prince William : I suppose Mr. Philips will take this 
very ill for two reasons ; one that he thinks all childish 
things belong to him, and the other because he'll take it ill 
to be taught that one may write things to a child without 
being childish." 

Nevertheless, the poems of Philips show signs of a new 
taste. He seeks a language of resemblance that will reflect 
the sweetness and grace of childhood, as is clear from the 
lines To the Honourable Miss Carteret: 

How shall I, or shall the Muse, 
Language of resemblance choose? 
Language like thy mien and face 
Full of sweetness, full of grace. 

He traces the child's growth from year to year by beholding 
the freshness of spring after spring, with each time a 
"brighter bloom" in the child. Although this attitude in- 
dicates a tendency to break away from classicist standards, 
he is chiefly concerned, like Prior, with the conscious belle 
who will exert her maiden reign over "fond beholders," fully 
half the poem being devoted to a description of her future 
courtship and nuptials. 

1 The Dictionary of National Biography notes that the third 
edition of Carey's 1713 publication contains the "Namby Pamby" 
poem. s. V. Carey, Henry. 



20 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

To Miss Margaret Pulteney (daughter of Daniel Pul- 
teney, Esq.) in the Nursery, April 27, 1727, is interesting. 
The ''Dimply damsel, sweetly smiling" rhythm is attractive 
but not sustained. Philips again avoids direct observation 
in the thought that ten years hence when he has ceased 
composing, ''beardless poets" will be "fondly rhyming," and 
accusing "each killing feature" of the cruel maid. There 
is a convincing touch in the lines on these youthful poets who 
will be 

Fescued now, perhaps, in spelling. 

A Supplication for Miss Carteret in the Small-Pox, 
Dublin, July 31, 1725, is a dignified if somewhat self-con- 
scious prayer for a child suffering from the dread chil- 
dren's scourge of the century. The disease was feared in 
ail English households. The early education of John Scott 
of Amwell was desultory because his father had such an 
extreme dread of the small-pox that the family repeatedly 
moved to shun it. Shaftesbury was shocked to hear that 
the measles had been followed in his sister's household by 
the small-pox "which I pray God were as safe over with 
them." Lady Montagu's letters to her daughter, and her 
earlier letters from Constantinople, frequently discuss the 
small-pox; and her efforts to ameliorate the condition of 
children by means of inoculation are well known. The 
same high seriousness and dread sincerity which char- 
acterize numerous eighteenth -century poems on the re- 
covery of adults from small-pox permeate the lines of 
Philips. 

To Miss Charlotte Pulteney, in her mother's arms. May i, 
1724, is the prettiest of his complimentary verses. Philips 
shows felicity of phrase in suggestions of the child's heed- 



IN OUR INFANCY 21 

less prattle. His charming analysis is illuminated, further- 
more, by a pleasing image from bird life. There is freshness 
and appropriateness in the lines which associate the sportive 
green linnet and the wanton infant. In the early period it is 
probably the first detached lyric that does not employ a na- 
ture image mechanically in a similitude. It represents an 
early effort to express something of the spiritual connotation 
of the linnet and the infant by an imaginative perception of 
the underlying unity of feeling. For once, too, the child is 
not lost in the marriageable maiden. In an attempt to be 
"simply elegant to please," Philips has written a masterpiece. 

Timely blossom, infant fair, 
Fondling of a happy pair, 
Every morn, and every night, 
Their solicitous delight. 
Sleeping, walking, still at ease, 
Pleasing, without skill to please, 
Little gossip, blithe and hale. 
Tattling many a broken tale, 
Singing many a tuneless song, 
Lavish of a heedless tongue, 
Simple maiden, void of art. 
Babbling out the very heart. 
Yet abandoned to thy will, 
Yet imagining no ill. 
Yet too innocent to blush. 
Like the linnet in the bush, 
To the mother-linnet's note 
Moduling her slender throat. 
Chirping forth thy pretty joys, 
Wanton in the change of toys. 
Like the linnet green, in May, 
Flitting to each bloomy spray. 
Wearied then, and glad of rest. 
Like the linnet in the nest. 



22 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

To Miss Georgiana, youngest daughter to Lord Carteret, 
August 10, 172^, indicates an attempt to write from direct 
observation. 

Is the silken web so thin 
As the texture of her skin? 
Can the lily and the rose 
Such unsullied hue disclose? 
Are the violets so blue 
As her veins exposed to view? 

In their appropriateness to the subject, these happy parallels 
are indicative of more than an effort to phrase literary com- 
pliments. The willingness to observe such details counts 
for much during the first quarter of the century. 

The poems of Ambrose Philips are not as well known as 
Prior's, but two of them are historically important as re- 
vealing early evidence of a new taste. Seventy-five years 
before Wordsworth he observed the green linnet and 
brought it into connection with childhood. 

In John Gay's lines To a Lady the child is the occasion 
of the poem. Like other poets, Gay observes the "tender 
mother" with her ''infant train," and notes every "dawning 
grace." The children are perfect images of their mother.^ 

1 Set phrases and imagery preclude vital treatment. These are 
especially noticeable in the countless panegyrical and epithalamic 
poems directed to members of the nobility and the reigning house. 
These poems echo the earlier classicist use of cupids, charms, and 
graces, or in a vein of strained compliment they felicitate bride and 
groom on prospective joys of the nursery (e. g., Thomas Newcomb's 
Ode to Lord Carmarthen on his Marriage with Lady Anne Seymour, 
1719). Girls are invariably the image of their mother, and boys 
always reflect the manliness and power of their father. Such lines 
are without doubt echoes of lines like those in the Nuptial Ode of 
Catullus, (cp. John Gilbert Cooper's Song to Winifreda.) 



IN OUR INFANCY 23 

The early virtues of the son promise new-won honors.^ Gay 
is able to focus his attention on the child only momentarily : 

When he the tale of Audenard repeats, 

His little heart with emulation beats; 

With conquests yet to come his bosom glows, 

He dreams of triumphs and of vanquished foes. 

Each year with arts shall store his ripening brain, 

And from his grandsire he shall learn to reign. 

This is commonplace enough when judged by romantic 
standards ; but in view of classicist unwillingness to analyze 
individual traits of young children, Gay's passing notice of 
the budding virtues and emotional reactions of the boy 
shows an incidental interest not common in the verse of his 
day. As in his lines on the sentimental apprentice who is 
poring over one of Otway's plays at a bookstall (Trivia), 
Gay reveals a willingness to find specific illustrations in 
place of the customary generalizations. 

Lady Winchilsea's beautiful poem On the Death of the 
Honourable Mr. James Thynne (Younger son to the Right 
Honourable the Lord Viscount Weymouth) comes from the 
heart of the poet, and, like her lines that reveal fresh ob- 
servation of external nature, is not characteristic of the age. 

1 Prose and poetry indicate that the preference for male chil- 
dren was strong. Compare the letter to Lovelace (Clarissa Har- 
lowe): "May the marriage be crowned with a great many fine boys 
(I desire no girls) to build up again a family so ancient. The 
first boy shall take my surname by act of Parliament. That is my 
will." Langhorne's Owen of Carron has the lines. 

In fortune rich, in offspring poor. 

An only daughter crowned his bed. 
Shenstone's Economy and Glover's Leonidas indicate that the child- 
less marriage was looked upon as unfortunate. Wordsworth's The 
Excursion speaks of lonely cottagers as the "wedded pair in child- 
less solitude." The dame awaits the return of her husband, "True 
as the stock-dove to her shallow nest." 



24 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Far from being representative, the poem is exceptional in 
point of view and choice of material. She writes with the 
affection of a close friend. After she has addressed herself 
to soothing the parents' grief, the boy's entombment is sym- 
pathetically phrased and is the occasion for notice of his 
ancestors, her intimate knowledge of the family adding vivid 
individual touches which make the passage more than a 
catalogue of titled names. 

She tries to dissipate the gloom by rescuing, if she may, 
the memory of what they ''lately saw so fresh and fair." 
Among the ''beauties of his blooming age" she had noted 

The pleasing light, that from his eyes was cast, 
Like hasty beams, too vigorous to last. 

She recalls harmless sports with his courser on the lawn. 
He was sprightly as the "enlivened game," and bold in the 
chase. 

Yet in the palace tractable and mild, 
Perfect in all the duties of a child. 

For its time this poem is unique in the marked tendency 
to close observation of an individual child. It gives inti- 
mate glimpses of the child against the home background. 
In many of her lines Lady Winchilsea is an early forerunner 
of those poets who wrote at the close of the century. 

Children are noticed only vaguely in Aaron Hill's lines 
Writ Upon a Pane of Glass in Westminster House under the 
names of his four children (1731). He notes that all was 
happy in his household while a living mother exercised her 
guardian care. 

But, joyless, since their sweet supporter died. 
They wander now, through life, with half a guide. 

Francis Fawkes's On the Death of a Young Gentleman, Sep- 
tember, iyS9y is preachy, and generalizes with little attempt 



IN OUR INFANCY 25 

to individualize beyond the reference to the child's taking 
away 

Ere the first tender down o'erspread your chin, 
A stranger yet to sorrow, and to sin. 

The poet's sentiments are dignified and appropriate, but 
there is no inclination to analyze the child's character or to 
notice individualizing traits. ^ 

The poet's devotion to his mother, which found expression 
in poetry from Thomson to Wordsworth, did not at first 
stimulate recollections of childhood. Pope, who through- 
out the eighteenth century was held up as a model of filial 
piety, expressed afifection for his mother in the Epistle to Dr. 
Arhuthnot (1735). But he did not severely modify the pre- 
cept of his school that there must be no display of purely 

1 The eighteenth-century tendency to moralizing resulted in the 
employment of generalized images that did not demand close ob- 
servation of children. Thomson's method of generalized descrip- 
tion is reflected in his treatment at the close of Spring, where he 
contemplates domestic felicity with children at the heart of the 
family. He phrases the child element in terms like "smiling off- 
spring" ; he observes that "infant reason grows apace" and calls 
for the "kind hand of an assiduous care." There is more vitality in 
the lines which portray the congenial moral element : 

Delightful task ! to rear the tender thought, 
To teach the young idea how to shoot, 
To pour the fresh instruction o'er the mind, 
To breathe the enlivening spirit, and to fix 
The generous purpose in the glowing breast. 

Hill's deep interest in his children is felt in his poem To Miranda 
(After marriage, with Mr. Locke's Treatise on Education). It in- 
dicates that he put into his wife's hands the volume which would 
serve as "a glass" to show her "what these infants are" in order 
that she might "by this just light direct their opening way." Yet 
he followed the literary method then in vogue, which allowed him 
to rest in a generalization. 



26 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

personal emotion. He alludes to his tender duties in pro- 
longing the life of his aged mother "with lenient arts" by 
rocking the ''cradle of reposing age." 

Ten years earlier, the romantically inclined Thomson 
endeavored to break through this restraint in his poem On 
the Death of His Mother (1725). He wished to give free 
expression to his sorrow; face to face with sad reality, he 
set out to thrust aside convention in order to write from 
the heart. 

Ye fabled Muses, I your aid disclaim, 
Your airy raptures, and your fancied flame: 
True genuine woe my throbbing breast inspires. 
Love prompts my lays, and filial duty fires; 
The soul springs instant at the warm design, 
And the heart dictates every flowing line. 

But Thomson can not wholly depart from poetic methods 
of his generation. In the fluctuations of his emotion he 
recalls how his widowed mother, her orphans about her, 
often "upbraided her needy hands" that could not accomplish 
all she had planned for her children. He alludes to his 
brothers and sisters, whom she left behind reluctantly. As 
is to be expected in a poem composed during the first quarter 
of the century, his strongest emotion is revealed in recollec- 
tion not of early childhood but of his departure from Leith 
for London, after which he did not again see his mother. He 
reproaches himself for having left her. That night of em- 
barkation is now a torture to him: "may darkness dye it 
with the deepest stains." In the tumult of his grief he 
wishes that he had been lost at sea, and that fate had not re- 
served him for the unruly woe he is now suffering. But he 
conquers his depression, and sees his mother "with immortal 
beauty glow." 'She no longer bears the "early wrinkle" 
which was "care-contracted" in work for her children among 
the "unnumbered ills" of poverty. 



IN OUR INFANCY 27 

For see ! attended by the angelic throng, 
Through yonder worlds of light she glides along. 

Langhorne's much later poem On His Mother (1759) 
shows little advance over Thomson's treatment : 

Source of my life, that led my tender years, 

With all a parent's pious fears, 
That nursed my infant thought, and taught my mind to grow. 

Although his recollection of childhood is more extensive 
than Thomson's, it is not more detailed : 

Careful she marked each dangerous way, 
Where youth's unwary footsteps stray : 

She taught the struggling passions to subside ; 
Where sacred truth, and reason guide, 

In virtue's glorious path to seek the realms of day. 

The closer observation of Ambrose Philips, Gay, and 
Lady Winchilsea becomes clear by comparison with Walter 
Harte's To the Right Honourable Lady Hertford, upon the 
birth of Lord Beauchamp (1721?). In this minor versifier 
the fashion of avoiding details of direct observation of the 
infant stands out baldly. The ''gentle infant" is adjured 
to rise from his slumbers, to lift his fair head and ''unfold" 
his "radiant eyes." While every bosom beats with height- 
ened pleasure. 

Surrounding eyes devour the beauteous boy. 

x\s if this were sufficiently close approach to direct contem- 
plation, Harte is off with the statement that the child is 
destined to be an ornament in other courts where he will 
"wound the hearts of beauties yet unborn." ^ After this the 

^ In Russell's sonnet (''Dear babe, whose meaning by fond looks 
expressed"), the child is less the subject than the poet himself. When 
he is thinking of the child, after the opening lines, he is concerned 
about her "riper year." 



28 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

poet returns to the beau in embryo and invokes the "gentle 
Nine" to descend and deck the infant with laurels and bays.^ 

William Whitehead's Charge to the Poets (1762) advises 
poets to leave traditional rhyming in which language "Des- 
cends like similes from Bard to Bard." - Poets have too 
long copied Greece and Rome.^ Although Whitehead's 
birthday odes often lean heavily on Venus and the Graces, 
his delightful poem On the Birth-day of a Young Lady 
(Four Years Old) reveals an attempt to hold the attention 
focused on the child. In place of insipid compliments 
there is a simple phrasing of the joy of parents over the 
first spoken words of their offspring. The poem has been 
overlooked by compilers of anthologies, but deserves a 
place in collections of childhood verse. 

^ Swift's Directions for making a birth-day song (1729) specifi- 
cally ridicules classicalities : 

To form a just and finished piece, 
Take twenty gods of Rome or Greece, 
Whose godship are in chief request, 
And fit your present subject best; 
And should it be your hero's case. 
To have both male and female race, 
Your business must be to provide 
A score of goddesses beside. 

- In A Love Song (in the modern taste), Swift takes a rhythmi- 
cal fling at the vogue of Cupid : 

Fluttering spread thy purple pinions, 
Gentle Cupid ! o'er my heart ; 
I a slave in thy dominions, 
Nature must give way to art. 

^ Thank heaven the times are changed ; no poets now 
Need roar for Bacchus or to Venus bow. 



IN OUR INFANCY 29 

The rosebud opens on her cheek, 
The meaning eyes begin to speak ; 
And in each smiling look is seen 
The innocence which plays within. 
Nor is the fault'ring tongue confined 
To lisp the dawnings of the mind, 
But fair and full her words convey 
The little all they have to say; 
And each fond parent, as they fall, 
Finds volumes in that little all. 

Criticism of contemporary poetry may, also, be indicative 
of progress. Poets themselves, after the middle of the 
century, were ready for a change. This is clear from 
Lloyd's The Poetry Professors, in which Lloyd is following 
up Swift's early protests. ^ He is stirred to rebellion by 
fulsome complimentary verse, and birthday odes are an 
abomination. - Now that England has not lost her prayers, 
and "A royal babe, a prince of Wales" has been born to 
George, 

Poets ! I pity all your nails — 

What reams of paper will be spoiled. 

What graduses be daily soiled 

By inky fingers, greasy thumbs, 

Hunting the word that never comes. 

1 The use of children to heighten effect aroused the ire of Swift. 
In the Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General he 
exposes this treatment as so much sham : 

Behold his funeral appears; 
Nor widow's sighs nor orphan's tears 
Wont at such times each heart to pierce. 
Attend the progress of his hearse. 
But what of that? his friends may say 
He had those honours in his day, 
True to his profit and his pride, 
He made them weep before he died. 

2 Compare The Fanciad, an Heroic Poem (1743) : 

No hackneyed Plunger, Mine — no Birth-Day Drone. 



30 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

He is disgusted with the classical trumpery of verse that 
will force pagan gods to walk again in triumph at the 
Christian birth of the prince.^ Poets of trim academic taste 
will 

lug them in by head and shoulders, 
To be the speakers, or beholders. 
Mars shall present him with a lance. 
To humble Spain and conquer France ; 
The Graces, buxom, blithe, and gay, 
Shall at his cradle dance the hay; 
And Venus, with her train of loves. 
Shall bring a thousand pair of doves 
To bill, to coo, to whine, to squeak. 
Through all the dialects of Greek, 2 

Signs of a change in point of view are noticeable also in 
Miss Whately's verses. She exalts simplicity and holds it 

1 Compare Gratulatio solennis Universitatis O.voniensis ob 
celcissimum Ger. Fred. Aug. Williae Principem, Ger. Ill et Char- 
lottae Reg. auspicatissime natum. Oxonii 1762. 

2 Lloyd found more congenial matter in the homes of middle- 
class Englishmen. The most extended lively passage that throws 
light on eighteenth-century nursery methods in London occurs in 
Robert Lloyd's Chit-Chat. The situation is dramatically conceived 
at the moment when Mrs. Brown and her companion are about to 
leave on a shopping tour. Jacky insists on accompanying his 
mother. In her attempts to reconcile Jacky to his fate, Mrs. Brown 
runs the gamut of appeals by frightening him with the suggestion 
of "bugaboes" and a "naughty horse" that will bite him, and the 
mob that will tread him under foot. Jacky has by this time 
descended from crying to whining, but his mother persists in warn- 
ing him that he might "better blubber, than be lame." She coaxes 
him to her with "Come, come, then, give mamma a kiss," calls Kitty 
to take Jacky and "fetch him down the last new toy," and to make 
him as merry as she can. — Compare also Tom Careful's son and 
daughter in Somerville's The True Use of the Looking-Glass. 



IN OUR INFANCY 31 

a virtue to be a stranger to birthnight balls.^ In Table 
Talk Cowper joins the democratic chorus and pities kings 
upon whom worship waits 

Obsequious from the cradle to the throne. 
Before whose infant eyes the flatterer bows, 
And binds a wreath about their baby brows. 2 

In Hope, his further strictures on man, who in his nurse's 
lap seems to have all the charms of a cherub, but is in 
reality 

the genuine offspring of revolt, 
Stubborn and sturdy, a wild ass's colt, 

smack of the late-century period of the Revolution. 

In his lines on the Death of an Infant, Lovibond shows a 
desire to substitute for well-worn sentiments and theological 
commonplaces a naturalistic conception that is new in this 
type of poem.^ The child is blessed whom Nature's gentle 
hand has taken 

E'en in his childish days, ere yet he knew 
Or sin, or pain, or youthful passion's force. 
In Earth's soft lap, beneath the flowery turf, 
His peaceful ashes sleep. 

Beattie's Ode on Lord Hay's Birthday reflects senti- 
mental humanitarianism. Beattie protests that his muse is 

1 The Lady's Poetical Magazine or Beauties of British Poetry, 
Vol. I, 1781. 

2 Compare Charles Churchill's The Ghost: 

Or for some infant doomed by fate 
To wallow in a large estate, 
With rhymes the cradle must adorn. 
To tell the world a fool is born. 

2 Gray is con^ entional in Epitaph on a Child. — Lovibond's The 
Death of a Young Gentleman shows traces of naturalism. See also 
Cawthorn's A Father's Extempore Consolation ("on the death of 
two daughters, who lived only two days"). 



32 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

unskilled in venal praise, and unstained with ''flattery's art." 
He emphasizes democratic virtues. As it matures, the 
child shall 

let the social instinct glow, 
And leani to feel another's woe, 
And in his joy be blessed. 

His ancestral towers will contain no dungeon or clanking 
chains, but instead 

The open doors the needy bless, 

The unfriended hail their calm recess, 

And gladness smile around. 

As ideals for the child, Beattie substitutes love of nature and 
rural simplicity. As admiring multitudes trace the patri- 
monial mien in the growing child, they will note ''the liberal 
smile" and the warm heart. Although the child may live 
to win a nation's love, he must not despise 

The village and the grove. 
* 

For innocence with angel smile, 
Simplicity that knows no guile, 
And love and peace are there. 

Beattie becomes so wrapped up in his vision of simple con- 
tentment that he forgets the child in the exaltation of the 
unselfish man, who alone is truly great. Though not dis- 
carded, the set imagery of traditional birthday verse is 
subordinated to the new material. 

Francis Hoyland's Ode (1763?) likewise reveals the 
older poetic method coming into contact with the sentiment 
of the sixties. His lines still contain personification which 
stands in the way of direct observation of the child ; but if 
"Zephyr" and "Poverty" are there, we find side by side with 
them unmistakable signs of personal expression. The Ode, 
which seems to have been addressed to his child under 



IN OUR INFANCY 33 

pathetic circumstances of poverty, had the distinction of 
being re-issued from the Strawberry Hill press. Little is 
known of Hoyland's life beyond the fact of his poverty. 
It seems that he had enjoyed some favor, but that depend- 
ence galled him. He had received a fatal boon, and he 
wants no more of it. He prefers the honest frown, and in 
the words of his biographer, "like the country-mouse, wishes 
to be restored to his crust of bread and liberty." 

The lines of welcome to his child, who from allusions to 
blackbirds was born probably in late winter, are worthy 
of high rank among poems about children. His love is 
simply expressed. Side glances to birds and flowers relieve 
emotional tension and enrich the theme. Although the 
sentimental note is not absent, Hoyland shows restraint, 
which, however, does not leave his reader cold. 

And art thou come, ere Zephyr mild 

Has waked the blackbird's vernal strain? 
Alas ! thou com'st, my beauteous child, 

Where Poverty her iron reign 
Extends, more bleak and cruel far 
Than winter or the northern star : 
Yet cease those cries, that all my pity move; 
Though cold the hearth, my bosom burns with love. 

Although he has enriched the passage by an image from 
nature, Lyttleton, in his lines in the Monody in memory of 
Lady Lyttleton (1747), echoes Hill's lines on his motherless 
little ones. 

Sweet babes, who, like the little playful fawns, 
Were wont to trip along these verdant lawns 

By your delighted mother's side. 

Who now your infant steps shall guide? 
Ah ! where is now the hand whose tender care 
To every virtue would have formed your youth, 
And strewed with flowers the thorny ways of truth? 



34 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

John Scott, who in one year had lost not only his father, 
but also his child and wife, has unaffectedly memorialized 
his grief in Amwell, in Hertfordshire (1768). His wife 
was like a lovely flower *'too fair for this rude clime" ; she 
bore "one beauteous pledge," but 'The fatal gift forbad the 
giver's stay" : 

In one sad spot, where kindred ashes lie, 

O'er wife, and child, and parents, closed the ground. 

During the last quarter of the century the two most 
widely read poems of this class were Shaw's MonOdy to the 
memory of Emma (1768) and Address to a Nightingale 
(1771). The secret of their popularity lies in a sentimental 
abandon to frank revelation of personal grief and sorrow. 
Cuthbert Shaw, the improvident and temperamental son of a 
shoemaker, was at one time and another a tutor in litera- 
ture to Chesterfield, an usher in a school at Darlington, 
hack writer for London newspapers, and an actor first in a 
traveling company and then at the Haymarket. He mar- 
ried above him in social rank, his wife renouncing friends 
and family for him. The seven poems addressed to her 
reveal Shaw's love and attachment. After the death of 
Emma upon the birth of her first child, he wrote the Monody, 
which poignantly expresses his grief. He will discard "pa- 
geantry of phrase" : "111 suit the flowers of speech with woes 
like mine." He asks friends to forbear telling him of her 
matchless virtues, which he knows too well. He hopes that 
the gush of tears from his welling heart may discharge his 
load of grief. Shaw wrote in the moments when he felt 
his loss most keenly. He sings her virtues in tearful lines 
that, of course, made a surer appeal during the sentimental 
sixties and after, than now when the reader prefers the 
poet's overflow of emotion recollected in tranquillity. A 
generation, however, that wept over Clarissa and Julia was 



I 



IN OUR INFANCY 35 

certain to be profoundly stirred by the dying Emma's appeal 
for the welfare of her child in the vision of a possible second 
wife's cruelty. Her homely appeal, "My dearest Shaw, 
forgive a woman's fears," is made dramatically effective by 
broken lines and pauses which reflect her tense emotion 
when she implores him to take her infant daughter to some 
remote spot where she may enjoy his parental love undis- 
turbed. 

The closing stanzas addressed to the infant left to share 
his woes, reflect the trembling sensibility characteristic of 
the poem. Shaw looks into the future. When the child is 
twining round his knees, his eyes will often fill with tears as 
he traces the mother's smiles and thinks of how the child 
was "Bought with a life yet dearer than thy own." Then 
he touches upon the motherless child motive : 

Who now shall seek with fond delight 
Thy infant steps to guide aright? 

The sentimental father is not satisfied to close his grief here, 
but must press on to the days when he will be ill and helpless. 

Say, wilt thou drop the tender tear, 
Whilst on the mournful theme I dwell? 
Then, fondly stealing to thy father's side, 

Whene'er thou seest the soft distress, 
Which I would vainly seek to hide. 

Say, wilt thou strive to make it less ? 
To soothe my sorrows, all thy cares employ, 
And in my cup of grief infuse one drop of joy? 

This is, indeed, the very luxury of grief. The playgoers 
who had been surprised into sentimental tears in 1696 had 
long passed away. But another generation that wept over 
sentimental plays and novels welcomed such a poem as 
Shaw's because the poet was writing in the mood which 
was popular in drama and fiction. 



36 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Shaw ag-ain levies the "tribute of a tear" in the ''sorrow- 
soothing strains" of the Address to a Nightingale, which 
three years later memorializes the death of Emma's child. 
The muse shall complain in piteous accents ''And dwell with 
fond delay on blessings past." Imagery drawn from bird 
life accentuates the fast-growing popularity of new subject- 
matter which was finally to crowd out altogether the tra- 
ditional set imagery. Shaw feels that the piteous notes 
which sadden all the groves must be prompted by a loss 
akin to his. Does the bird mourn a lost mate, or is she 
bereft of her darling young? The poet weeps for both. He 
has lost a bride in her youthful charms, but also "A lovely 
babe that should have lived to bless" his declining years. 
The child languished for a mother's aid, and winged its 
flight to seek her parent in the skies. No one is left to 
"soothe the anguish of an aching heart." Strangers who 
are far removed from his affections must fulfill the last sad 
office. Yet as long as he has life he will dwell fondly on 
"blessings past." 

Although his sentimentalism is literary, Shaw can not be 
accused of the insincerity of Sterne. Shaw differs from 
Sterne in that his poems are motivated by personal grief. 
No matter how the modern reader may react to his literary 
method, two historical facts stand out; that his grief em- 
phasized the personal point of view toward childhood, and 
that the deep impression he made upon his and the following 
generation prepared the way for a more sympathetic ap- 
proach to childhood by accentuating emotional treatment. 

During this period the boundaries of poetry were in fact 
extended to include a minuter and more specific interest in 
infants and nursery affairs. Poetry had lagged behind prose 
in notice of the mother's duties toward her child in such 
matters as nursing, diet, clothes, regulation of sleep. In 



I 



IN OUR INFANCY 37 

view of contemporary interest in the interminable poems on 
apple growing, raising the sugar cane, tilling the fields, and 
caring for sheep, one feels justified in the expectation of 
coming upon a poem dealing with the nurture of infants. 
Armstrong had in fact written a poem on health, in which, 
however, he had taken no notice of the needs of children. 
The general neglect is all the more surprising in view of 
the broad foundation Locke had laid in Thoughts, in which 
he discussed the minutest details of exercise, care and 
covering of the feet, clothes, diet, bedding, and sleep. Locke 
was widely read throughout the century, and Richardson 
must have had his Locke open before him while writing 
Pamela (1740). Richardson has Pamela discuss the duties 
of a mother to nurse her child. Publishers' announce- 
ments from 1728 to 1 79 1 indicate that books on child nur- 
ture were in demand.^ 

Before Jerningham's // Latfc (1767), which treats at 
length of the mother's obligation to nurse her child, poets 
had not awakened to the needs of infants. - Jerningham is 
forward-looking in sentiment, although he employs the set 
imagery of earlier poetry. -Amid allusions to Lucina's 
friendly aid, and fluttering Loves and Cupids, he couches 
an appeal for a consideration of the natural rights of the 
infant who "with artless eloquence" asks "The boon of 

1 The ever-widening interest in children finally prompted Hugh 
Downman, M. D., to write a poem called Infancy, which was pub- 
lished in two parts in 1774 and 1775. It is uninspired, and gives 
practical directions for the care of young children, in diction that 
is anything but poetic. Ahhough the very favorable notices in the 
Monthly Review hail the author as a benefactor of childhood, the 
editor observes that "there are no vulgar mothers or vulgar nurses 
who can decipher the recipe for making what, we think, they call 
pap." Specimens are quoted in Monthly Review,, Vol. LIII. p. 200. 

2 Compare, however, J. Warton's Fashion. 



38 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Nature, but asserts in vain." The mother's task is resigned 
to strangers ''while Nature starts, and Hymen sheds a 
tear." While the mother seeks fantastic pleasure, the nurs- 
ling lifts his voice, "his tears unnoticed, and unsoothed his 
pain." Like Beattie, Jerningham advocates the return to 
nature in the interest of the welfare of infants. Of what 
avail are "the splendid nursery, and the attendant train?" 
It would have been better had the infant first seen light in 
an obscure cottage, where he would have reposed securely 
in the "cradling arm" of a cottage mother. 

Say why, illustrious daughters of the great, 
Lives not the nursling at your tender breast? 

Although the problems surrounding childbirth were dis- 
cussed in magazines, earlier poets of the century seem to 
have been content with references to Lucina's squalling hour 
or with colorless details in remote connections such as the 
birth of Apollo or Time.^ There seems to have been slight 
inclination even throughout the middle decades of the cen- 
tury to approach the subject more closely than Langhorne, 
who calls upon man to contemplate his birth and "mortify 
his pride" ; or he writes of man as "helpless born," one 
whom the "brute sagacious" might scornfully behold. ^ In 
the eighties, however, Mr. Ekins unaffectedly approaches 

1 Planetary influence, although it persists as a curious survival 
of traditional lore, is not vitally associated with childhood. Sir 
Walter Scott's radical change of plan in Guy Mannering; or The 
Astrologer indicates his belief that astrology was no longer familiar 
to readers. Yet Wordsworth wrote of fanes in which the moon 
was once worshipped by matrons who 

yielding to rude faith 
In mysteries of birth and life and death 
And painful struggle and deliverance — prayed 
Of thee to visit them with lenient aid. 

2 Compare also Mason's The Dean and the Squire. 



IN OUR INFANCY 39 

the subject in a poem On the Birth of a First Child (1783). 
Preoccupied as he is chiefly with the novel joys and duties 
of parenthood, he does not fail to notice details in the cir- 
cumstances of motherhood that must precede a joy like his.^ 
Thomson had long before the sixties brought poverty 
and sentiment together, and indeed had focused them on 
childhood. Men like Hoyland and Shaw had tapped the 
reservoir of personal emotion in the development of themes 
from childhood. It remained for Burns to open the flood- 
gates, twenty years after Hoyland's Ode, in A Poet's Wel- 
come to his Love-he gotten Daughter (1784), with the sub- 
title "The first instance that entitled him to the venerable 
appellation of father." Hoyland and Shaw had already 
broken with classicist restraint that frowned upon the dis- 
play of personal emotion as evidence of singularity, but 
Burns is a son of the Revolution in the rebellious bravado 
with which he faces an unfriendly world. Although he 
feels the irregularity of the child's birth, he is not disturbed 
by it. He will be a loving father "and brag the name o't." 
He will love her as the "Wee image o' my bonnie Betty." He 
gives her a fatherly kiss and sets her near his heart. Though 
she came unsought for, and the gossips will "tease" his 
name "in kintry clatter," she shall be "bienly clad" and well 
educated. He will not blush when she calls him "Tyta or 
daddie." His wishes are that she may inherit her "mither's 
person, grace, and merit" and her own worthless daddy's 
spirit, "without his failins." Johnson had given good 
classicist counsel in his dictum that "very few can boast of 
hearts which they dare lay open to themselves, and of 
which, by whatever accident exposed, they do not shun a 

' Compare Epitaph on Lady Lucy Meyrick who died in child- 
birth, by Dr. Peter Templeman. — In A Classical Arrangement of Fu- 
gitive Poetry, vol. XV (1797), On the Birth of a First Child is at- 
tributed to the Rev. Dr. Jeffry ("Late Dean of Carlisle") . 



40 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

distinct and continued view; and, certainly, what we hide 
from ourselves we do not show to our friends." Burns, 
however, shows the triumph of a different philosophy, and 
the complete emergence of romantic individuality. 

Before Burns the theme of the expectant mother is no- 
ticed in vague platitudes. ^ Burns's treatment of the theme 
in two ballads that are associated with Jean Armour is symp- 
tomatic of the frank realism of the naturalistic school. In 
the home of the miller of Tarbolton, where Burns had found 
shelter for her after she had been disowned by friends and 
family, she recounts her loneliness, but is cheered by his 
gifts. ^ Winter will soon pass away, and Spring will bright- 
en the birchwood. Then her ''young baby will be born," and 
"he'll be hame that's far awa." The Rantin Dog, the Dad- 
die O't (1786) is a study of the lonely mother's fluctuations 
of emotion as she thinks ahead to her humiliating situation 
in the penance stool. Other fears press upon her. Will 
he help her name the child; will he show affection in her 
hour of trial; but above all, "wha my babie-clouts will 
buy?"^ 

In Burns the free play of personality almost wholly 
crowds out set imagery, which gives place to spontaneous 
treatment of childhood in his delightful complimentary 
poems A Rose-Bud By My Early Walk and To Miss Cruick- 
shank, as well as in the humanitarian On the Birth of a 
Posthumous Child. These poems are far removed from 

1 Compare Beattie's The Minstrel, I, stanza 15 (at Edwin's 
birth), 

The gossip's prayer for wealth, and wit, and worth. 

2 The Bonie Lad That's Far Azva. 

3 For a discussion of the unmarried mother, see The Unmarried 
Mother in German Literature, by Oscar H. Werner (Columbia Uni- 
versity Press). 



IN OUR INFANCY 41 

the art of Prior in that they are written in the mood of a poet 
who knows nature intimately in country lanes and by-ways. 
Burns has substituted flowers and animals for classical 
mythology and conventions of polite London society. The 
child is made attractive through association with fresh im- 
agery drawn from nature. 

While suffering from a cold that confined him for some 
days to the house of Mr. William Cruickshank, a teacher in 
the high school at Edinburgh, Burns composed songs which 
Janet Cruickshank, his ''sweet little Rose-bud," helped him 
set to music on her harpsichord. Two complimentary 
poems are the result of his sojourn in the Cruickshank 
household. In A Rose-Biid By My Early Walk (1787) the 
poet is definitely out of doors. He feels the freshness and 
glow of life in the fields as he breathes in the rich perfume 
of the rose, and observes 

Within the bush her covered nest, 
A little linnet fondly pressed, 

who will soon hear her brood among the ''green leaves 
bedewed" waken the early morning with their song. 

So thou, dear bird, young Jeany fair. 
On trembling string or vocal air, 
Shall sweetly pay the tender care 

That tents thy early morning. 

So thou, sweet Rose-bud, young and gay, 
Shalt beauteous blaze upon the day. 
And bless the parent's evening ray 

That watched thy early morning. 

Like Prior, Burns is writing in a complimentary vein, but 
for the graces of a highly organized society Bums has em- 
ployed natural beauty, and has addressed the child in terms 
of birds and flowers. 



42 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The identification of maiden and flower is complete in 
To Miss Cruickshank (1787). In spite of the phrases 
''Boreas' hoary path" and ''Eurus' poisonous breath," which 
show a backward look to classicist material, the spontaneous 
nature imagery, which recognizes no cleavage between 
flower and child, places this effusion by the side of its com- 
panion poem as a charming manifestation of the new atti- 
tude in occasional verse on children. 

On the Birth of a Posthumous Child (1790) retains the 
structural elements of early eighteenth-century occasional 
verse, but at the same time weaves in beautiful nature 
imagery with a dignity and appropriateness worthy of the 
poet's prayer for the welfare of the helpless orphan. Burns 
speaks with simple sincerity. 

May he who gives the rain to pour, 

And wings the blast to blaw, 
Protect thee frae the driving show'r, 

The bitter frost and snaw. 
* 

Blest be thy bloom, thou lovely gem. 

Unscathed by ruffian hand. 
And from thee many a parent stem 

Arise to deck our land. 

The charm of these poems, then, lies not in the increased 
willingness or power to observe the child as an individual, 
but in the substitution of nature imagery and humanitarian 
sentiment for classicist material. 

There is also a vast difference of method between the 
early poetic use of set imagery and the free naturalistic ob- 
servation of Blake. Watts's A Cradle Hymn (17 19) char- 
acteristically treats the child as a kind of lay figure or 
bit of stage property. In Watts's lullaby, the mother's ab- 
sorption in her narrative causes her to sing so vehemently 
that she awakens her child. She shows no inclination to 



IN OUR INFANCY 43 

observe the child itself. Blake's A Cradle Song, on the 
other hand, depicts a mother who is sensitive to impressions 
of her sleeping infant. The reader is made to feel that she 
is watching over a living, breathing creature, and she draws 
spiritual suggestions from her baby's body. (She lovingly 
traces soft desires and pretty infant wiles in her baby's face. 

As thy softest limbs I feel, 
Smiles as of the morning steal 
O'er thy cheek and o'er thy breast 
Where thy little heart does rest. ^ 

On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture out of Norfolk 
has been called the ''most resplendent gem in Cowper's 
casket." The poem embodies that finality in sentiment and 
form which is essential to the creation of a classic. Cow- 
per's poem, like those of preceding poets on the mother 
motive, is the expression of loving duty toward a parent 
whose memory he cherishes. Like them he contemplates 
her happy state in Heaven ; but he enjoys the advantage of 
not being overwhelmed by an immediate sense of grief. Not 
the death of his mother, but her picture inspires him, so 
that he need not attempt to express an overflow of emotion, 
but may write with serenity. In the warm glow of recol- 
lection he awakens tender memories of his earliest childhood 
days. Through contemplation of his mother's picture, he 
has lived his childhood over again and has ''renewed the 
joys that once were mine." jHis recollections of childhood 
companionship with his mother are suffused with tender re- 
gret. 

Unlike Thomson and Langhorne, Cowper analyzes his 
childish thoughts and emotions. His imagery of childhood, 
conceived with the concreteness of Wordsworth, and ex- 

1 In Poems from the Rossetti Manuscript. 



44 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

pressed with equal simplicity, carries the reader back to 
the poet's earliest years at the knees of his mother, or to 

Where the gardener Robin, day by day, 
Drew me to school along the public way, 
Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapped 
In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet capped. 

Or he gives intimate glimpses of life in the household : 

Thy nightly visits to my chamber made, 

That thou mightest know me safe and warmly laid; 

Thy morning bounties ere I left my home, 

The biscuits, or confectionary plum; 

The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed 

By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed. 

No details are too lowly to be recalled with afifection. The 
sentiment is throughout reduced to its true simplicity ; there 
is no tendency toward rhetoric. The poem is written with 
a colloquial ease that never, even in an informal phrase like 
"mimic show of thee," disturbs the fine sincerity of the 
lines. The intimate details indicate how far poetry had 
developed, since the days of Prior and Pope, in the direction 
of easy personal revelation. 

Wordsworth has several times by extended interpreta- 
tion of details noticed the infant in the hour of its birth. ^ 
For the master poet of our study no phase of childhood is 
unworthy of exalted poetic interpretation. He looks upon 
natural joy over the birth of a child as a fit subject for 
poetic treatment, his imagery being in harmony with his 

temperamental high seriousness. In To (upon the 

birth of her first-horn child, March, i8^^), Wordsworth's 
treatment follows much the same general outline as the 
poem of Ekins, but he has enriched it with imagery and 
suggestions of spiritual insight. A beautiful calm per- 

1 See Michael and The Thorn. 



IN OUR INFANCY 45 

vades the lines, which join with the facts of direct observa- 
tion a high philosophy of spiritual contentment and thanks- 
giving. 

He considers the plight of the helpless babe who, 
'Tlung by labouring nature forth," lies in ''tenderest naked- 
ness." From the ''penalty" of the mother's throes that are 
now ended, there springs "more than mortal recompense" 
in the ''blissful calm" 

Known but to this one release. 

The mother's silent thanks, that rise "incense-like" to 
Heaven, mingle also 

With the gush of earthly love, 
As a debt to that frail Creature, 
Instrument of struggling Nature. 

The troubles and pains of life which the child will experience 
are 

Presignified by that dread strife 

Whence ye have escaped together. 

But if the child follows the steps of her mother 

She may look for serene weather; 
In all her trials sure to find 
Comfort for a faithful mind; 
Kindlier issues, holier rest, 
Than even now await her prest, 
Conscious Nursling, to thy breast. 

In addition to his deep spiritual insight, Wordsworth 
often displays a matter-of-fact, almost scientific, faithfulness 
of observation. Luke slept for two days after his birth, 
"as oft befalls to new born infants." But as the poet con- 
templates his favorite daughter Dora at the age of one 
month, while she sleeps in "heedless peace," he is not dis- 
turbed by scientific doubts as to automatic muscular contrac- 
tions. He notes that 



46 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Smiles are beginning, like the beams of dawn 

To shoot and circulate, . . . 

Tranquil assurance that Heaven supports 

The feeble motions of thy life, and cheers 

Thy loneliness : or shall those smiles be called 

Feelers of love, put forth as if to explore 

This untried world? 

In the true mood of naturalism his thoughts turn to her 
probable state had she been 

of Indian birth 
Couched on a casual bed of moss and leaves, 
And rudely canopied by leafy boughs, 
Or to the churlish elements exposed 
On the bleak plains. 

The closing stanzas of Dorothy's The Mother s Return 
(1807) reveal a sympathetic insight into the sudden changes 
and fleeting moods of early childhood. After hours of 
vigorous play there is a "momentary heaviness" of heart 
when the evening star calls to rest, but they run upstairs 
in "merry fit" and "gamesome race." 

Five minutes past — and, O the change ! 
Asleep upon their beds they lie; 
Their busy limbs in perfect rest, 
And closed the sparkling eye. 

Dorothy's Holiday at Gzverndivifnant, May, 1826, likewise 
shows her faithful observation of the almost instantaneous 
alertness of children upon awaking in the morning. After 
evening prayer 

Theirs is one long, one steady sleep, 

Till the sun, tip-toe on the steep 

In front of our beloved cot, 

Casts on the walls her brightest beams. 

Within, a startling lustre streams. 

They all awaken suddenly; 

As at the touch of magic skill. . . . 



I 



IN OUR INFANCY 47 

In The Excursion (V) Wordsworth is subtle in his obser- 
vation of the infant who, as he slowly awakens, stretches his 
limbs, 

bemocking as might seem, 
The outward functions of intelligent man. 

_ Wordsworth's To H. C. (Six Years Old) (1802) illus- 
trates the change of poetic treatment that came with a fuller 
acceptance of the theory of natural rights and rights of the 
individual. Prior and Ambrose Philips looked upon chil- 
dren in the light of the doctrine of conformity. They 
thought of the child in terms of the belle, and Thomas 
Warton conceived the young prince in terms of the states- 
man.^ In doing this they observed the fruition of the nor- 
mal development the child was expected to follow. The 
civilization under whose protection they lived, depended for 
its existence on conformity by mutual consent. The career 
of the children who were subjects of their verse was pre- 
determined by circumstances that had become fixed, and it 
was the natural expectation that children would fit into the 
groove into which they had been born.^ 

The romanticists, however, in so far as they were sons 
of the Revolution, and had felt the forces working for 
democracy, did not recognize the binding power of human 
institutions. They brushed aside the ideal of conformity 
and gave free play to individuality. Tt follows that Words- 

1 On the Birth of the Prince of Wales (1762). 

2 On the Prince of Wales's Birth 1762 by William Henley Esq. : 

Sleep, royal infant, sleep; 
Round thee may guardian powers their vigils keep. 
How little dost thou know, 
Whilst leaning on thy nurse's breast, 
Or in thy mother's arms carest, 
The high important toils 'tis thine to undergo! 



48 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

worth can not forecast the future of the child with the same 
certainty as the earHer poets; the individual is inexplicable 
because the springs of life are obscure and because man, a 
law unto himself, is forever different from his fellows. 
Whatever the merits of such an attitude, for the child in 
poetry it had a two- fold advantage ; first, that the poet looked 
upon the child as an individual worthy of profound attention 
and study; and secondly, it followed from this, that any 
manifestation of his individuality in mood or action was a 
fit subject for poetry. 

Because he is interested in the child for what he is now — 
a fresh natural being — rather than for what he may become 
through training (compare Emile), Wordsworth in the pres- 
ence of Hartley Coleridge is preoccupied with the problem 
of catching the secret of his individuality. But the fleetmg 
moods of this faery voyager among men baffled direct 
analysis. Wordsworth therefore applies transcendental 
philosophy clothed in vague, skyey imagery. The child's 
fancies are brought from afar ; he makes a mockery of words 
and fits to unutterable thoughts 'The breeze-like motions 
and the self-born carol." He is a faery voyager whose boat 
seems less to float on earthly streams than to brood on air. 
The child's thought life is so ethereal that he lives as though 

Suspended in a stream as clear as sky, 

Where earth and heaven do make one imagery. 

Though the poet is sufficiently practical to fear for the fu- 
ture of such a child, he is attracted by the very excess of 
individuality which arouses his fears : 

O blessed vision ! happy child ! 
Thou art so exquisitely wild. 

Hartley is so delicately constituted as to be unfitted for the 
unkind shocks and soiling tasks of life. He is "a dew-drop, 
which the morn brings forth," that ''glitters while it lives," 



IN OUR INFANCY 49 

But, at the touch of wrong, without a strife 
Slips in a moment out of life. 

As the poet looks into the future, he feels that nature will 
be good to the child by taking him off before worldly mat- 
ters bring grief and melancholy that he can not endure ; or 
nature will keep him a child always and preserve him 

by individual right, 
A young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks. 

Thought and imagery are here in sharp contrast to the 
clearly defined outHnes of Prior. Though Wordsworth's 
analysis is evanescent in effect, and though he at times seems 
to destroy physical reality in atteinpting to interpret the 
child's personality, we know from Coleridge's account that 
Hartley was an unusual if not abnormal child. Wordsworth 
was not fantastic, but had his eye on the child. This is 
evident from Coleridge's own remarks : 

Hartley is a spirit that dances on an aspen leaf; the air that 
yonder sallow-faced and yawning tourist is breathing, is to my babe 
a perpetual nitrous oxide. Never was more joyous creature born. 
Pain with him is so wholly trans-substantiated by the joys that had 
rolled on before, and rushed on after, that oftentimes five minutes 
after his mother has whipt him he has gone up and asked her to 
whip him again. 

Wordsworth was fascinated by the unusual personality 
revealed in this child, and in so far as it was possible with 
the poetic treatment congenial to him, he has given a true 
interpretation of Hartley Coleridge at the age of six. He 
took no external standards for granted, but looked upon the 
child as an individual worthy of individual treatment on 
the basis of laws of conduct revealed in the child itself. 



CHAPTER II 

THE GROWING BOY 

In my poor mind it is most sweet to muse 

Upon the days gone by; to act in thought 

Past seasons o'er, and be again a child ; 

To sit in fancy on the turf-clad slope 

Down which the child would roll; to pluck gay flowers, 

Make posies in the sun, which the child's hand 

(Childhood offended soon, soon reconciled) 

Would throw away, and straight take up again, 

Then fling them to the winds, and o'er the lawn 

Bound with so playful and so light a foot. 

That the pressed daisy scarce declined her head. 

Childhood: Charles Lamb. 

Children who appear in lines on play are usually beyond 
the nursery age; they are old enough to be out of doors, 
and to enjoy more vigorous pastimes. In Going into 
Breeches, Charles Lamb has caught the boisterous spirit and 
greater freedom which mark the transition from indoor 
games to outdoor play. 

Puss in Corners, Hide and Seek, 

Sports for girls and punies weak. 

Baste the bear he now may play at, 

Leap-frog, Foot-ball, sport away at, 

Show his skill and strength at Cricket, 

Mark his distance, pitch his wicket. 

Run about in winter's snow 

Till his cheeks and fingers glow, 

Climb a tree or scale a wall 

Without any fear to fall. 

The early poets, however, in their passing notice of chil- 
dren, did not phrase an equally lively appreciation of the ac- 



THE GROWING BOY 51 

tivities of the growing boy. In classicist poetry the earliest 
reference to children in the fields associates them with 
flowers ; but had John Philipps in Cyder shown a vital sym- 
pathy with children at play, the phrasing of such an interest 
would have been exceptional. The early poets, in the main 
town poets, were committed to a consideration of manners 
at the center of fashion. With few exceptions, evidence 
of interest in outdoor play appears incidentally. Often the 
general subject is close to childhood, as in Shenstone's 
Schoolmistress or Gray's Ode on a Distant Prospect of 
Eton College, The poet occasionally focused his attention 
on outdoor play in such poems as Hoyland's Guardian 
Angel, Bruce's Lochleven, Scott's Childhood, Lovibond's 
Combe Neville, and White's Childhood. Incidental notice 
ordinarily implies a generalized conception ; but when the 
personal element emerges, after the middle of the century, it 
is usually accompanied by specific details that localize and 
individualize the experience. 

The change from Thomson's impersonal attitude to 
Wordsworth's extended autobiographical recollection is 
gradual. The personal element is dependent for effective 
realization upon the poet's willingness to phrase specific 
details. The difference between this and generalized de- 
scription will be noted in connection with play in fields and 
by the side of streams. The full emergence of the personal 
element, which came with the growth of sentiment, will 
be observed in connection with the play of schoolboys and 
the poet's fond recollection of native fields. 



From the days of Thomson, children are increasingly ob- 
served in fields and woods. Their roving habits often car- 
ried them away from the home plot and village green. To 



52 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

be under the eye of parents, they were frequently taken into 
the harvest field to help in gleaning. |Children assisting at 
harvest were portrayed at first as miniature harvesters — 
little workers thought of in terms of their elders. As soon 
as poets became more familiar with the details of external 
nature, and as their growing sympathy with childhood 
awakened them to a realization that children are individuals, 
poetry reflected those details which differentiate boys and 
girls from their elders. Children are no longer merely at 
work, but are tempted in child fashion by berries at the 
roadside or near the hedge. 

In a typically conceived description of hay-making In 
Summer, Thomson notes how 

Infant bands 
Trail the long rake, or, with the fragrant load 
O'ercharged, amid the kind oppression roll. 

Activity in which children must certainly have taken part 
is suggested without specifically connecting with them the 
''blended voice" that was ''heard from dale to dale." In 
Amzvell, Scott is equally general in his lines on the annual 
recurrence of 

The shouts of harvest, and the prattling train 
Of cheerful gleaners. 

Little advance is shown by Wordsworth in a late sonnet 
("Intent on gathering wool from hedge and brake") in 
which he notices unaccompanied children. They work glee- 
fully in expectation that a "poor old Dame" will bless them 
for their gift. Closer observation is revealed in the early 
sonnet "Sweet was the walk along the narrow lane" (1792, 
or earlier), in which childhood traits are sympathetically 
noticed. The children accompanied their elders, who were 
gleaning tufts of hay caught by a hawthorn hedge from the 



THE GROWING BOY 53 

loaded wagon as it passed down the lane. While seeming 
to be even busier than their elders in plying the ''little rake," 
they at the same time "with cunning sidelong look" saun- 
tered to ''pluck the strawberries wild unseen." Words- 
worth has more than once associated children with straw- 
berries. In another passage, in Epistle to Beaumont (1811), 
he notes that the strawberries he enjoyed at an early-morn- 
ing breakfast in the lowly grange in Yewdale had been 
gathered from lane and woodside. Poured in hillocks, they 
were the "offering wild of children's industry." 

The story of children in field and wood is not complete 
without mention of berrypicking and nutting expeditions. 
These are part of the unpublished seasonal schedule of 
childhood pastimes. As was to be expected, earlier poets 
are concerned with practical considerations. ^ Poems on 
subjects of husbandry, like The Hop-Garden, The Fleece, 
or The Sugarcane, reveal a matter-of-fact attitude that is 
very different from the personal point of view of more in- 
spired moralists like Cowper and Wordsworth. When, in 
Agriculture, Dodsley notices the problem of children wand- 
ering in the fields, he is preoccupied with the dangers that 
beset the hungry child who is tempted to taste of the "allur- 
ing fruit" of the deadly nightshade. As a matter of fact, 
the poet is reading a lecture to farmers on the dangers of 
ill-weeded and unkept fields. He does not spare realistic 
details of the various steps that lead up to the hideous death 
of the child who has unwarily eaten poisonous berries. The 

1 This attitude persists in later poetry. In The Oak and the 
Broom (1800), as Wordsworth contemplates the broom precariously 
growing in a fissure of rock, he fears for the little witless shepherd 
boy who may be tempted some sultry noon to slumber in the branches 
of this lightly-rooted tree. Cowper has the "little ones" from the 
village gather kingcups and daisies, but also a cheap and wholesome 
salad from the brook (The Task, VI). 



54 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

passage closes with an apostrophe to Providence, which 
has concealed poison in a form so tempting. Dodsley can 
not understand why this bane should be allowed to grow 
"so near the path of innocents." Numerous passages show 
that nightshade seems to have been especially feared. Scott 
in Rural Scenery calls upon shepherds to warn children (who 
roam ''beside the public way") against the pernicious plants 
that spring from rank soils, and especially against the dead- 
ly juice with which the "nightshade's berry swells." In 
Rural Business he is less sombre when giving harvest counsel 
which is timed by reference to the season when bramble 
berries change from red to black, 

And boys for nuts the hazel copses range. 

In his lines To Contemplation, White shows an attempt 
to individualize. He loves to listen to 

the little peasant's song, 
Wandering lone the glens among, 
His artless lip with berries dyed, 
And feet through ragged shoes descried. 

At an earlier date, the personal element appears in 
Hoyland's lines to his guardian angel ("Sweet angel of my 
natal hour"), one of the tenderest poems of the century. 
He recalls how he was led by "simple Nature" and was 
guarded from harm : 

'Twas thou, whene'er I ranged the mead, 
That drew me from the pois'nous weed 

Of tempting purple dye; 
That drew me from the fatal brake. 
Where, coiled in speckled pride, the snake 

Allured my longing eye.^ 

1 Thomas Day's Sandford and Mertoim contains a snake episode 
very much like that developed in Mary Lamb's unconvincing The 
Boy and the Snake (in which little Henry shares his breakfast with 
a snake which he calls familiarly "Grey Pate.") 



THE GROWING BOY 55 

The personal note is clearly heard also In one of Cow- 
per's finest autobiographical passages in The Task : 

E'er since, a truant boy, I passed my bounds, 
To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames; 
And still remember, nor without regret, 
Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared, 
How oft, my slice of pocket-store consumed. 
Still hungering, pennyless, and far from home, 
I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws. 
Or blushing crabs, or berries that emboss 
The bramble, black as jet, or sloes austere. 
Hard fare ! but such as boyish appetite 
Disdains not, nor the palate, undepraved 
By culinary art, unsavoury deems. 

In the autobiographical poem {Nutting, 1799) which re- 
cords a destructive visit to hazel coppices near Lake Esth- 
waite, Wordsworth recalls one day singled out from many, 
"One of those heavenly days that cannot die." He pictures 
the boy with "huge wallet" slung over his shoulders, a 
nutting crook in hand, and dressed in ragged clothes saved 
by frugal Dame Tyson against the time when he would en- 
counter thorns and brambles. In lines which vigorously 
respond to his recollection of having "dragged to earth both 
branch and bough" he bears witness to that rough and 
unfeeling nature which is traditionally associated with boys 
of a certain age. 

The same change from early-century incidental and gen- 
eralized notice to late-century personal recollection or in- 
dividualization may be observed in other phases of the 
growing boy's outdoor activities. In Summer, Thomson's 
passage on sheep shearing merely notices 

The clamour much of men, and boys, and dogs, 



56 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

and glances aside to the sturdy boy "glorying in his might" 
as he holds the indignant ram by its ''twisted horns." In 
his Sugarcane Grainger flattens out this incident by refer- 
ence to the ''infant throng" who "proud of their prowess" 
attempt to hold the "struggling ram." In his Fleece, Dyer 
fails to visualize children who were present at the sheep- 
shearing festival of sprinkling the rivers with flowers, in 
fact does not bring them into his picture beyond noting 
that "their little ones look on delighted." Sentiment colors 
Scott's treatment. The beauty of the flowers which his 
swain plucks for Delia is enhanced because he gathers them 
during the evening hours when village children stray in the 
green meadows. More romantic also is Cowper's ideal of 
freedom (Retirement) , which finds perfect expression in the 
shepherd boy who unfolds his flock at the first breeze of 
dawn when glittering dew-drops are on the thorn. The 
boy unconsciously enjoys the essence of freedom while he 
sits under bank or bush, linking cherry stones or plaiting 
rushes. Do not ask him how fair freedom is — he has 
never known another state. In carefree mood he carves 
his "rustic name" upon a tree. 

Wordsworth's shepherd boys are vitally conceived. 
They are less placid than earlier poetic children, and also 
more mischievous. In Luke, who caught at the legs of 
sheep, and "with shouts scared them" while they were un- 
der the shears, or who stood at the gate in the fields "some- 
thing between a hindrance and a help," may be observed a 
child who is far removed from the theoretical children of 
the earlier poets. In The Idle Shepherd-Boys; or, Dun- 
geon-Ghyll Force, a Pastoral (1800), Wordsworth gives 
lively glimpses of the changing moods of careless boys who 
neglect duty for play. They are sitting beneath a rock. 



THE GROWING BOY 57 

Their work, if any work they have, 
Is out of mind — ^or done. 

On whistles fashioned from branches of a sycamore tree 
they are playing snatches from a Christmas hymn. As 
a livelier mood overtakes them they run a race for one of 
the whistles as a prize. In the midst of the race one dares 
the other to follow him on a natural bridge of rock over 
the chasm made by the waterfall. The challenger, "all eyes 
and feet," with staff in hand as a balance, is half way across 
when he hears the bleat of a lamb that had washed over the 
waterfall into the pool beneath. At this moment the poet 
appears and assists them in extricating the swirling lamb, 
but not without gentle admonishment to "better mind their 
trade." 

Children at play by river and stream have been noticed 
repeatedly. The range is from merely incidental notice to 
extended observation. They may be gathering flowers on 
the bankside, or may be at play in the water or upon it Al- 
though poets usually prefer to emphasize the happiness of 
children, play by the water does not always have a happy 
ending, and poets have not been slow, especially in ballads 
and narrative poems, to employ the pathetic incident of a 
drowned child. ^ 

In Summer, Thomson has described with more than 
customary detail a youthful swimmer who is enjoying a 
bath in a favorite swimming hole which shows a sandy 
bottom. 

1 Charles Lamb has developed this motive in To a River in 
Which a Child was Droivned. Compare also the kidnapping scene 
in Wilkie's Epigoniad, where the child's curiosity leads to his cap- 
ture. See also Petherton Bridge, An Elegy, inscribed to the Rev. 
Mr. Bean, by Mr. Gerrard fin The Lady's Poetical Magazine or 
Beauties of British Poetry. London, 17S1). 



58 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Awhile he stands 
Gazing the inverted landscape, half afraid 
To meditate the blue profound below ; 
Then plunges headlong down the circling flood. 
His ebon tresses and his rosy cheek 
Instant emerge ; and through the obedient wave, 
At each short breathing by his lip repelled. 
With arms and legs according well, he makes 
As humour leads, an easy-winding path ; 
While, from his polished sides, a dewy light 
Effuses on the pleased spectators round. 

Thomson enjoyed his description. His enthusiasm, perhaps 
stimulated by recollection of his boyhood feats in the Scot- 
tish Tweed, leads him into an encomium on swimming, 
which, he believes, not only exhilarates the body but knits 
the limbs. The mind too receives a sympathetic toning- up 
from the glow of life in the body. His faith in the efficacy 
of winter baths in the open shows that he was a cold-water 
enthusiast, and believed with Locke in hardening the child's 
body. He finally takes shelter in an historical parallel. 
The mighty Roman arm that conquered the world had 
learned "while tender, to subdue the wave." 

Blair shows originality by bringing the "children gath- 
ering flowers" motive into connection with a youngster at 
play by the side of a rivulet. The episode is included with- 
in the limits of a similitude, which is extended, however, to 
nine blank verse lines. In spite of its sombre mood and 
bald moralizing, Blair's Grave (1743) is nevertheless for 
the lover of children one of the most rewarding of earlier 
poems. Blair seems to look upon childhood as a rich mine 
of illustrations. In his lines on the irresolute youngster, 
the faithful details reveal a lively and half-amused interest. 
The boy has been attracted by flowers on the opposite bank. 
Poetic diction hardly obscures Blair's sympathetic obser- 
vation in the line which introduces the growing fear of the 



THE GROWING BOY 59 

boy: "How wishfully he looks to stem the tide." His 
analysis of the fluctuating resolve, until the boy dips his 
foot into the water, after which his fears are redoubled, 
so that he runs off unmindful of the flowers on the farther 
bank, is done with care for details. ^ 

Gray's lines on swimming in the Ode on a Distant Pros- 
pect of Eton College are generalized. His muse led him to 
wonder what Eton boys were now bathing in Thames. 

Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen 

Full many a sprightly race 
Disporting on thy margent green 

The paths of pleasure trace, 
Who foremost now delight to cleave 
With pliant arm thy glassy wave ? 

In Leven-Water, even the author of Peregrine Pickle could 
wax sentimental over the "pure stream" in whose "trans- 
parent wave" he had bathed his youthful limbs. In Auld 
Lang Syne Burns recalls how 

We: twa hae paidl'd in the burn, 
Frae morning sun till dine. 

In The Prelude Wordsworth is likewise more personal 
than Gray in his recollection of how he had made "one long 
bathing of a summer's day" in the Derwent, which flowed 
at the foot of his father's garden. He has painstakingly 
localized the experience. 

the bright blue river passed 
Along the margin of our terrace walk; 
A tempting playmate whom we dearly loved. 
Oh, many a time have I, a five years' child, 

1 Compare The Stepping-Stones. Wordsworth does not devel- 
op the situation beyond the lines. 

Here the Child 
Puts, when the high-swoln Flood runs fierce and wild, 
His budding courage to the proof. 



60 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

In a small mill-race severed from his stream, 
Made one long bathing of a summer's day; 
Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again 
Alternate, all a summer's day. . . . (Book I) 

In Winter, Thomson has given a composite picture of 
tobogganing and skating scenes that are international in 
their subject-matter. He has not overlooked the ''happiest 
of all the train," who is none other than the ''raptured boy" 
lashing his whirling top. He is not individualized farther 
than that. In Vicissitude, Mickle notes a boy who returns 
at night from "his day-sport on the ice-bound stream." 
Wordsworth, on the other hand, is specific and individual in 
his skating scene, even to the precise statement of the hour 
when Hawkeshead boys began the game of hunt the hare, 
and caused an uproar that was echoed by the precipices. 
They spread their coats to the wind and scudded down the 
lake. Wordsworth's lines are suggestive of the keen frosty 
air and the sense of bodily strength and animal vigor 
which made these boys wheel about exultingly like an un- 
tired horse that cares not for its home. It was a tumultuous 
throng that hissed along the ice. Although the youthful 
Wordsworth often left the uproar to skate by himself in 
a quiet bay or to cut across the reflection of a star, and al- 
though he reports one unusual experience when he stopped 
so suddenly while in full career that the cliffs were moving 
past him as though he beheld the visible motions of the 
earth, yet the passage, more than any other that is descrip- 
tive of his adventures in field and on mountain, depends on 
sense impression for its effect. The gleam is there, but it 
is subordinated to a keen sense of boyish delight in animal 
motions. Natural phenomena of winter impressed them- 
selves upon this sensitive boy even while he was enjoying a 
game of loo or whist in Dame Tyson's cottage ; the game 
was often interrupted by splitting fields of ice on Esthwaite 



i 



THE GROWING BOY 61 

when the pent-up air in freeing itself made "loud pro- 
tracted yelling" like howling wolves. 

II 

Some of the most exhilarating lines in the early poems 
picture the delight of children just out of school. To illus- 
trate the mad scamper of the freed pack from the kennel, 
Somerville in The Chase refers in an epic simile to boys who 
rush from school and "give a loose to all their frolic play." 
In The Schoolmistress, Shenstone's schoolboy, his task done, 
ran forth with "jocund sprite" to freedom and to joy. 
Somerville's enthusiasm for the chase rises so high that 
everyone leaves his occupation at the huntsman's call, even 
to the schoolboy who does not heed his master, but flies from 
his prison. Mason makes his point in political verses by 
comparing unfaithful legislators who have "quit St. 
Stephen's dome" to truant schoolboys roaming with hound 
and horn. In Syr Martyn, Mickle rounds out the picture 
of youthful truants, who probably came honestly by their 
British love of outdoor sport. Mickle's youngster is stand- 
ing on a "green bank," in his hands an "ashen rod" which 
obeys his guileful hands. He leads the mimic fly across the 
way of a wary trout. He succeeds in hooking his quarry, 
evidently to the admiration of the poet, who finally enters 
into the situation with enthusiasm. This is reflected in the 
minute details which bear witness to the skill of the young 
fisherman, who showed himself precocious at fly casting 
if not at his books. 

Late in the century Bampfylde inclines to specific details 
while quaintly visualizing 

the boisterous string 
Of school-imps, freed from dame's all dreaded sight, 
Round the village cross, in many a wanton ring. ^ 

1 To the Evening. 



62 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Mary Lamb's detached poem The Journey from School and 
to School tries to catch the spirit of youngsters "jumbled 
all together" in a coach : 

Sometimes we laugh aloud aloud, 

Sometimes huzzah, huzzah, 
Who is so buoyant, free, and proud, 
As we home-travelers are? 
In The Prelude, Wordsworth recalls the ''noisy crew" 
at Hawkeshead with their "round of tumult." They were 
"mad at their sports like withered leaves in winds." It was 
a "race of real children" who were "bandied up and down 
by love and hate." In The Excursion he carries on the tra- 
ditional figure of unwilling inmates of the schoolroom and 
their glad release. The boys of the parsonage were 
A few short hours of each returning day 
The thriving prisoners of the village school: 
And thence let loose, to seek their pleasant homes 
Or range the grassy lawn in vacancy. 
The open space known as the village green, which 
often was adjacent to the highway, may be looked upon as 
the eighteenth-century public playground for children. In 
The Schoolmistress, when "Liberty" has unbarred her prison 
door, children run pell-mell from school. 

And now the grassy cirque had covered o'er 
With boisterous revel-rout and wild uproar; 
A thousand ways in wanton rings they run. 

See in each sprite some various bent appear. 

These rudely carol most incondite lay; 

Those sauntering on the green, with jocund leer 

Salute the stranger passing on his way; 

Some builden fragile tenements of clay; 

Some to the standing lake their courses bend, 

With pebbles smooth at duck and drake to play. ^ 

^ It is a pity that the realistically conceived passages of 

Shenstone, West, and Mickle are hobbled with Spenserian archaisms. 

These poets were, of course, writing in the satirical tradition; but 

they did observe childhood with more than customary sympathy. 



THE GROWING BOY 63 

The generalized observation of children at play and in 
mischief on city streets or on the highway goes back as 
far at least as Swift. Merciless in the exposure of sham 
and vanit}', he delighted to think of children who in chorus 
heap ridicule upon a pompous person. Shenstone noted 
how youngsters out of school mockingly salute passers-by. 
Soame Jenyns took up the theme in The American Coach- 
man, where the horses become unmanageable and run away. 
In a few well chosen phrases he enters into the spirit of the 
boys who enjoy the excitement, and by bawling of "Stop 
them ! Stop them ! till they're hoarse" mean only to make 
the horses run faster. This phase of children's activities is 
probably best known from Cowper's incidental lines in 
John Gilpin. Here, again, dogs bark, children scream, and 
everyone bawls out "well done" as poor Gilpin gallops help- 
lessly down the street. ^ The satirical tradition is carried 
on in Chatterton's Resignation where 

A lengthening train of boys displayed him great, 
He seemed already minister of state. 

Chatterton asks in the Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Catcott 

(1769), 

What pattern of humility and truth 

Can bear the jeering ridicule of youth? 

In Kew Gardens he alludes to the motive in a similitude : 

Your infant muse should sport with other toys, 
Man will not bear the ridicule of boys. 

In the same poem he ridicules the officers of trainbands who 
are stirred to action "When some bold urchin beats his drum 
in sport." 

1 Compare Cowper's letter (Edition Wright, Vol. Ill, page 59) : 
"My brother drove up and down Olney in quest of us, almost as 
often as you up and down Chancery Lane in quest of the Madans, 
with fifty boys and girls at his tail, before he could find us." 



64 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Crabbe and Wordsworth modify the theme to suit 
special situations such as a village burial or celebration of 
victory. In this instance as in others that have to do with 
children at play or their life in the nursery, the close ob- 
servation of the satirists has been carried over by later poets 
into their dominant mood of respect and reverence. The 
motive still heightens effect, but the poet's intention is no 
longer satirical. Crabbe sees idle children who, while wand- 
ering about a newly-made grave, take on the "tone of woe." 
In The Village (1783), children suspend play *To see the 
bier that bears their ancient friend." He had been one 
with them in all their idle sports, had formed the "pliant 
bow," the "flying ball," and had also constructed a bat and 
wicket for them. Wordsworth was stirred by the possibili- 
ty of a Napoleonic invasion. His thoughts were absorbed 
by the danger which threatened his beloved England. In- 
cluded in the sonnets dedicated to National Independence 
and Liberty is Anticipation, which celebrates an expected 
victory over Napoleon on British ground. The poet calls 
on old men to come forth and on wives to make merry ; but 
the accompaniment of childish noises is not overlooked, 
even to those of infants in arms. 

ye little children, stun 
Your grandame's ears with pleasure of your noise ! 
Clap, infants, clap your hands ! 

Curiously enough, the most detailed late-century ac- 
count of games on the green occurs in Childhood of the 
gloom-ridden White. When the dame's school had been 
dismissed, the dame sat spinning before her cottage, and 
"o'er her spectacles would often peer" to watch the gam- 
bols of her scholars. 

What clamorous throngs, what happy groups were seen, 

In various postures scattering o'er the green. 

Some shoot the marble, others join the chase 

Of self-made stag, or run the emulous race; 



THE GROWING BOY 65 

While others, seated on the dappled grass. 

With doleful tales the light-winged minutes pass. 

Well I remember how, with gesture starched, 

A band of soldiers oft with pride we marched; 

For banners, to a tall ash we did bind 

Our handkerchiefs, flapping to the whistling wind; 

And for our warlike arms we sought the mead. 

And guns and spears we made of brittle reed; 

Then, in uncouth array, our feats to crown, 

We stormed some ruined pigstye for a town. 

Wordsworth pictures an equally wholesome afternoon's 
sport on a bowling green picturesquely laid out on the 
garden slope above the Lion Inn on Lake Windermere. 
Boys from Hawkeshead had to walk to the western shore 
of the lake, and then row across to the inn. 

There, while through half an afternoon we played 
On the smooth platform, whether skill prevailed 
Or happy blunder triumphed, bursts of glee 
Made all the mountains ring. 

Sentiment often colours side glances to play. In Pollio 
(1762), Mickle feels in harmony with his surroundings on 
a peaceful evening while ''playful schoolboys wanton o'er 
the green." In Lochleven Bruce draws an idyllic picture 
of a happy valley in which, for once, girls with golden hair 
trip nimble-footed on the green, and wanton in their play 
with "blooming boys." Grandsires of the village sit in 
"reverend row" in the sunshine before the gate, and shake 
their "aged locks with joy" while they recall "well remem- 
bered stories of their youth." ^ In Blake's Nurse's Song 

1 Compare The Deserted Village : 

The young contending as the old surveyed. 
Mr. Hudson's Ode to Fancy gives a picture of dancing swains and 
damsels : 

The simple notes, and merry gambols fire 

(Placed by the hawthorne-hedge) each ancient sire. 



66 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

the heart of the poet is made glad by the sounds of chil- 
dren at play on the green. In their reply to the nurse's sug- 
gestion that the sun has gone down and it is time to stop 
play, the words of the children suggest a typically English 
pastoral background : 

in the sky the little birds fly, 
And the hills are all covered with sheep. 

The sentimental note is heard as soon as the poet recol- 
lects his own early play. In this mood the generalized in- 
terest in happy children tends to give way to a keen realiza- 
tion of the difference between the cares and sorrows of 
manhood and the undisturbed happiness of childhood. 

Althougli Gray feels a ''momentary bliss" as he thinks of 
schoolboy play at Eton, his recollections induce melancholy 
musings. The 'little victims" at play in the years when 
ignorance is bliss are "regardless of their doom." Unlike 
the hardier truants of Somerville and Mickle, they snatch 
a fearful joy outside the bounds set by school authorities. 

Some bold adventurers disdain 
The limits of their little reign, 

And unknown regions dare descry; 
Still as they run they look behind. 
They hear a voice in every wind. 

And snatch a fearful joy. 

Within bounds the "idle progeny" chase the "rolling circle's 
speed" or "urge the flying ball." The play of these school- 
boys may have been in fact "redolent of joy and youth," but 
Gray's melancholy lines do not call to mind lively, scamper- 
ing children. They may have quarreled and have forgotten 
their tears "as soon as shed," but the sombre muse of the 
poet hardly allows him to enter into sports as tame as those 
recorded. It is perhaps unjust to say that the lines are 
frigid, but the glow, if indeed it is reflected at all, is cer- 



THE GROWING BOY 67 

tainly dull. The muse of Gray did not find congenial matter 
in the coarser pleasures and glad animal spirits of children. 
Their activities are sicklied o'er with a pale cast of thought.^ 
Yet in his contemplation of lawns and flowerets, the 
thought of children tripping lightly over them came to Gray 
with such peculiar grace that he has written what is probab- 
ly the most poetic line on childhood in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. It occurs in the "redbreast" stanza, which was first 
printed just ahead of the epitaph in the third edition of the 
Elegy. Unfortunately it was later canceled, for Gray has 
written opposite the stanza in the Pembroke MS., "Omitted, 
1753." 

There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, 

By hands unseen, are showers of violets found; 

The red-breast loves to build, and warble there, 
And little footsteps lightly print the ground. 2 

Although Scott's lyric To Childhood is more vivacious, 
it also is motivated by the belief that "ignorance is bliss." 
Scott and Gray do not link childhood and manhood. In 
their conception, children are carefree because they do not 
realize what life has in store for them ; they are ignorant of 
the ills of fortune which come with manhood. Neither Gray 
nor Scott looks upon play as a preparation for life. Gray 
is moved to melancholy, and writes in the mood of the grave- 
yard poets. Although Scott is not sombre, he too is moved 
to sadness over what has been irrevocably lost. 

^ Contrast Thomson's lively boy {Castle of Indolence, Canto I, 
Stanza XXV) : 

The lad leaped lightly at his master's call : 

He was, to weet, a little roguish page, 

Save sleep and play, who minded naught at all. 

2 Compare Martial's lines on the little girl Erotion (Horace 
Scudder, Childhood in Literature and Art). 



68 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Childhood! happiest stage of life, 
Free from care and free from strife, 
Free from Memory's ruthless reign, 
Fraught with scenes of former pain; 
Free from Fancy's cruel skill. 
Fabricating future ill; 
Time, when all that meets the view, 
All can charm, for all is new; 
How thy long-lost hours I mourn. 
Never, never to return! 

Then to toss the circling ball, 
Caught rebounding from the wall; 
Then the mimic ship to guide 
Down the kennel's dirty tide; 
Then the hoop's revolving pace 
Through the dusty street to chase; 
O what joy — it once was mine. 
Childhood, matchless boon of thine! 
How thy long-lost hours I mourn. 
Never, never to return ! 

At the close of the century White also recognizes a break 
in continuity, and mourns the loss in Childhood. 

Sweet reign of innocence, when no crime defiles, 
But each new object brings attendant smiles; 
When future evils never haunt the sight, 
But all is pregnant with unmixed delight. ^ 

1 Cp. Shenstone's conception in Economy: 
O lovely source 

Of generous foibles, youth ! when opening minds 

Are honest as the light, lucid as air. 

As fostering breezes kind, as linnets gay, 

Tender as buds, and lavish as the Spring! 
Childhood is here the source of manhood; it is not a separate unit 
of existence. In his Schoolmistress he definitely recognizes contin- 
uity of development in the lines on a youthful bench of bishops. 
Wordsworth was familiar with the poem. 



THE GROWING BOY 69 

In "Sweet angel of my natal hour" Hoyland likewise is 
saddened by the dominance of cold reason in manhood ; but 
his closing stanza seems to suggest the possibility of a return 
to the happiness of childhood days. 

Come then, resume thy guardian pow'r, 
Sweet angel of my natal hour, 

To whom the charge was given ! 
Once more receive me to thy care, 
For ever kind, for ever near, 

If such the will of Heaven. 

Lovibond's On Rebuilding Combe Neville recognizes 
continuity of development from the child's play to the man's 
activities. As a schoolboy at Kingston, Lovibond often 
availed himself of the rich heritage of British schoolboys — 
who, wherever their school may be situated, are certain to 
be within walking distance of an abbey, cathedral, or castle 
— and roamed within the precincts of '^Neville's ancient 
halls." 

Loved seat, how oft, in childish ease. 

Along thy woods I strayed, 
Now venturous climbed embowering trees. 

Now sported in their shade. 

Now, languid with the noontide beams. 
Explored thy precious springs. . . . 

He regrets the "improvements" that are destroying the 
favorite spot of his outdoor play, and touches lightly on the 
loss of the carefree spirit of his early days. 

Along thy hills the chase I led 

With echoing hounds and horns. 

And left for thee my downy bed, 
Unplanted yet with thorns. 

Although his recollections are generalized, the poem con- 
tains a far-away suggestion of Wordsworth's backward look 



70 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

that exalts play hours as a valuable part of a boy's edu- 
cation. He seems to believe that the dreams of his boyhood 
fashioned his manhood. 

Each smiling joy was there, that springs 

In life's delicious prime; 
There young Ambition plumed his wings. 

And mocked the flight of Time. 

There patriot passions fired my breast 

With Freedom's glowing themes, 
And Virtue's image rose confessed 

In bright Platonic dreams. 

Mickle definitely conceives of play as a factor in mould- 
ing character. His Epitaph on General Wolfe (1759?) 
strikes a modern note in the desire to direct a child's activi- 
ties by guiding his play instincts. 

Briton, approach with awe this sacred shrine, 

And if the Father's sacred name be thine, 

If thou hast marked thy stripling's cheeks to glow 

When war was mentioned, or the Gallic foe. 

If shining arms his infant sports employ, 

And warm his rage — Here bring the warlike boy, 

Here let him stand, whilst thou enrapt shalt tell 

How fought the glorious Wolfe, how glorious fell. 

Then when thou mark'st his bursting ardour rise. 

Catch his young hand. 

In Bruce and Beattie, interest in genetics is unmistakably 
reflected. Bruce, whose love of remote valleys and roman- 
tic glens is symptomatic of a coming master like Words- 
worth, has Lavina leave her schoolmates at their play in 
order to roam in search of ''curious flower" or "nest of bird 
unknown." In this way she learned to love wild flowers. 
An early sister of the nature-loving children of Wordsworth, 
Lavina thus revealed in her youth ("the index of maturer 
years") a romantic love of nature in solitary haunts. In 



THE GROWING BOY 71 

tracing the child's play in Lochlevcn, Bruce is aware of its 
influence on character. Beattie, whose intention in The 
Minstrel is to trace the growth of a minstrel from child- 
hood, notes similar traits in Edwin. 

Concourse, and noise, and toil he ever fled; 

Nor cared to mingle in the clamorous fray 

Of squabbling imps ; but to the forest sped 

Or roamed at large the lonely mountain head, 

Or, where the maze of some bewildered stream 

To deep untrodden groves his footsteps led. . . . 

English schoolboys generally, it is evident from senti- 
mental poetry, did not love birds and flowers in the mood 
of Lavina and Edwin. Marauding truants rouse the senti- 
mental poet's indignation. In The Blackbirds (1753) Jago 
offers to take the bird's nest into the thickest brake "imper- 
vious to the schoolboy's eye." In The Goldfinches (1735) he 
vents his wrath on the ''ungentlest of his tribe," a truant 
who had despoiled the nest of its brood. The indignant 
poet accounts for the truant's lack of fine feeling by refer- 
ence to his school exercises, which reveal no sense for 
harmony : he blunders over his scrawl, which is charac- 
terized by ''hideous prosody" and "concord false." There 
seems to have been need of an Audubon society in the senti- 
mental decades of the eighteenth century, for in The Linnet 
Graeme notices how the bird had built her nest where "no 
savage boy" could find it, and later how the mother linnet's 
song did not protect her against "The schoolboy's lawless 
stone." 

Cowper's experiences at school, and his later humanitar- 
ian interests, precluded sympathy with outdoor sports even 
of the shepherd boy who, while his flocks are peacefully 
grazing, "snares the mole" or with "ill-fashioned hook" 
draws the "incautious minnow" from the streamlet. The 
colorless lines in themselves give evidence not only of Cow- 



72 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

per's lack of sympathy with such pastimes, but also of his 
inability to enter into the spirit of the boy whose rustic sim- 
plicity otherwise appeals to him. Cowper takes every op- 
portunity to condemn all forms of sport that have as their 
object the killing of animals. 

Wordsworth, who especially in The Prelude looks on 
play in fields and woods as an educational force in moulding 
character, wrote with equal fervor in defense of hunted 
animals, but was sturdy Englishman enough to remember 
with enthusiasm the joys of fishing he had experienced 
while a schoolboy at Hawkeshead. He records with '*no re- 
luctant voice" how he and his mates followed 

the rod and line, 
True symbol of hope's foolishness, whose strong 
And unreproved enchantment led us on 
By rocks and pools shut out from every star. 
All the green summer, to forlorn cascades 
Among the windings hid of mountain brooks. (I, 485-490) 

In comparison with earlier poets, he gains power in propor- 
tion to his ability to infuse into the recollection of his early 
experience something of the natural magic of the mountain 
background into which by a subtle transformation he merges 
his simple adventures. His genius interfused with the 
bare statements of narrative a transcendental interpretation 
that in this instance tends to obscure the outlines of fact. 
The connotative power of such words as ''symbol," "en- 
chantment," ''star," "forlorn," "windings hid," which are in 
themselves not essential to the story of his fishing trip, tends 
to carry the attention away from merely external notice of 
the experience to a consideration of its significance. He is 
not reproducing the facts of the fishing expedition, as 
did Mickle, to the smallest point of technique. The passage 
is rather, in all its beauty, an interpretation of the nuances 
which nature vouchsafes, not to the mighty hunter, who is 



THE GROWING BOY 73 

bent upon capturing his prey, but to the sensitive boy who 
responds to spiritual suggestions of external nature. 
Wordsworth tells of no quarry. Where Somerville and 
Mickle enjoyed the physical delights involved in the un- 
equal test of wits between man and animal, Wordsworth 
went so far as to destroy the efficacy of rod and line except 
as symbols that led the boy into a land of enchantment. 

He differs from preceding poets in the willingness to use 
concrete details. His interest lies in their influence on 
character development. In The Excursion the two school- 
boys who burst upon the company in the parsonage are 
''keen anglers" elated with ''unusual spoil" (VH). One 
bears a willow pannier, and the other carries a smooth blue 
stone on which are outspread in order from largest to 
smallest a "store of gleaming crimson-spotted trouts." The 
boys tell the story of each catch, not omitting that of the 
"very monarch of the brook" who had escaped them. 
Wordsworth employs this solid substratum of detailed fact 
as a basis for interpretation of the character of the boys. 

In the episode of the raven's nest in The Prelude, Words- 
worth's point of view stands out in sharp contrast to that 
of the sentimental poets who wholly condemned schoolboys 
for pilfering nests. When spring had warmed the valley 
of Yewdale, he and his companions moved as 

plunderers where the mother bird 
Had in high places built her lodge. (I) 

Unlike Jago and Graeme, he does not wholly condemn these 
incursions: they were not an end in themselves, but the 
pilfering led to realizations of spiritual manifestations that 
would not have come to the boy from any other source: 

though mean 
Our object and inglorious, yet the end 
Was not ignoble. 



74 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

When the boy has finally climbed to where he overhangs 
the raven's nest, Wordsworth loses sight of the quarry in an 
interpretation of the boy's sense of oneness with eternal 
forces. 

Oh ! when I have hung 
Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass 
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock 
But ill sustained, and almost (so it seemed) 
Suspended by the blast that blew amain, 
Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time 
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone. 
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind 
Blow through my ear! the sky seemed not a sky 
Of earth — and with what motion moved the clouds ! 

Far from overlooking the physical boy and his natural ac- 
tivities, the poet is nevertheless absorbed in an effort to 
catch fleeting glimpses of a growing boy's soul life. This 
he accomplishes by analysing his own early experiences in 
fields and woods, where nature taught him in boyhood with 
inscrutable workmanship those elements that are a needful 
part of the calm moments he enjoys when worthy of him- 
self. 

Praise to the end! 
Thanks to the means which nature deigned to employ; 
Whether her fearless visitings, or those 
That came with soft alarm, like hurtless light 
Opening the peaceful clouds ; or she may use 
Severer interventions, ministry 
More palpable, as best might suit her aim. 

This deeper insight is revealed, again, in his notice of 
another phase of the growing boy's activities. Words- 
worth extended interest in outdoor play to include the 
child's delight in boating. Hand in hand with this ex- 
tension of boundaries there will be noted a difference of 
treatment. There is a vast difference between the early 



THE GROWING BOY 75 

poet's brief generalization and almost bare enumera- 
tion, ^ and the more leisurely lines of Wordsworth which 
retard the action in order to linger affectionately over de- 
tails. Wordsworth's forerunners — for especially Bruce, 
Lovibond, Scott, and Beattie were his poetic forbears in 
their ability to feel if not fully to express recollection of 
childish play — had not learned the art of poetically fusing 
natural phenomena, to which they sensitively reacted, with a 
natural philosophy of which they were only dimly conscious. 
Wordsworth's narrative of the boat ride in The Excursion 
incorporates details of preparation in the vicar's cottage, 
the walk down the stream bed to the lake, the arrival of the 
two boys, the row to the island, the picnic, and the return. 
The bare details necessary for a visualization of the outing 
would not demand half of the one hundred and fifty blank 
verse lines Wordsworth devoted to his description. The 
essential difference between the earlier poets and later master 
does not lie merely in the addition of such details as skim- 
ming stones and awakening the echoes, or gathering water 
lilies, details which in themselves enrich the development of 
the theme. He has interwoven comments that reveal his 
deep insight into the significance of the minutest facts of 
observation. His method is discursive, but unity and 
harmony are achieved through the sympathetic observation 
of a seer who looks upon all manifestations of life with a 
high and clearly formulated philosophy that enhances the 
depth and beauty of external nature. He is not feeling his 
way dimly, but is working with conscious art, so that he 
may, instead of announcing his mood and then illustrating 
it enumeratively, fuse the mood and the external fact with 
an art that awakens in his reader a feeling for the unity of 
spirit and matter as manifested in the individual experience. 

1 Compare Thomas Warton's The Hamlet. 



76 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Islands in Lake Windermere were on many occasions 
the goal of boat races and boating excursions. His effective 
lines image the youthful rowers and their sweeping oars. 
But his interest is not in the race so much as in the lesson 
which the quiet retreat on the island taught of the self- 
sufficing power of solitude. In the evening when the boys 
lay in their boats while a comrade on the island played on 
a flute, the young Wordsworth's sympathies were enlarged, 
and the ''common range of visible things" grew dearer to 
him. 

He not only throws about common experience a halo of 
imagination, but succeeds in associating, and often fusing, 
the experience with the powers of the universe. In such 
treatment children no longer stand apart, but are merged 
with the eternal flux of life as revealed in nature. Words- 
worth is not satisfied to rest in the observation of phenomena, 
but goes on to interpret their significance for the child. 

Ill 

The growing tendency to look back with affection on 
early associations is revealed most fully in connection with 
the change that took place in the eighteenth century from 
the rationalistic to the sentimental point of view. While 
the worship of reason was reaching its height in the en- 
cyclopedists and the academic war of pamphlets over a sub- 
ject like deism, a new poetic method slowly gained a foot- 
hold by emphasizing the trustworthiness of impulses from 
the heart. Reason, it was beginning to be felt, had failed 
to provide an adequate solution for the momentous prob- 
lems of religion and philosophy, and poets were increasingly 
willing to turn elsewhere for an answer to their question- 
ings.^ Their willingness to itrust emotions had its eff'ect on 

^ An Essay on the Universe (1739) by Moses Browne: 
Who scorn the Modish Sceptic's scoffing Chair, 
Faultless in Manners, in Opinion clear. 



THE GROWING BOY ^7 

poetic treatment of childhood. The emotional interpreta- 
tion of life irresistibly led poets to a contemplation of their 
childhood days in such a mood as that of Gray, whose lines 
enshrine the countryside near Eton and Stoke Pogis : 

Ah, happy hills, ah, pleasing shade. 

Ah, fields beloved in vain, 
Where once my careless childhood strayed, 

A stranger yet to pain. 
I feel the gales, that from ye blow, 
A momentary bliss bestow. 

This tendency is especially strong in those transition poets 
who were born in remote villages and country places where 
they had tasted the sweets of solitude and come in contact 
with the life of woods and fields. ^ There they had vaguely 

1 Although one must always except Charles Lamb's affection 
for London, it is significant that the affection for native fields did not 
flourish in city or village surroundings. Scott recalls how rural 
Amwell stirred him to poetry in early youth; but even he, whose 
name has become attached to that of the hamlet, sings of "lovely 
sylvan scenes." Burns is not thinking of the village when he refers 
incidentally but feelingly to Ayr, "my dear, my native ground." 
Fitzgerald, obviously writing in imitation of Goldsmith, would dwell 
upon the charms of his native village, but like Scott notices chiefly 
surrounding farms and "verdant hills." There is humor too in his 
inability to weave the name of his beloved Tipperary into verse 
(The Academic Sportsman) : 

And thee, dear village! loveliest of the clime, 
(Fain would I name thee, but I can't in rhyme) 
Where first my years in youthful pleasures passed. 
Crabbe's native Aldborough has come off badly in the lines which 
image its hideous squalor. Bristol was doubly unfortunate as re- 
membered by Chatterton and Lovell. They speak of their native 
city in terms of vituperation. Chatterton's Last Verses are bitter: 
Farewell, Bristolia's dingy piles of brick, 
Lovers of Mammon, worshippers of Trick. 
Ye spurned the boy who gave you antique lays. 
Lovell's Bristol apostrophizes Chatterton as the ill-starred youth 



78 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

felt spiritual ministrations which constitute the determining 
factor in Wordsworth's recollections of childhood play. 

The attention of early poets to the native fields motive 
prepared the way for Wordsworth's conception in The Pre- 
lude and Ode. Recollection, therefore, must be associated 
with agreeable sensations, for in the romantic development 
the tendency is to purify and exalt childhood. Unpleasant 
associations have a negative influence that is out of harmony 
with the poet's chief intention. ^ This excludes, for in- 
stance, the sentiment that departure or banishment from 
native fields is a misfortune. ^ A favorite device is to pic- 

who was luckless to have been born in a city where no one fostered 

worth. He writes of Bristol : 

The widows mourn, the fatherless complain, 
But (shame to Bristol!) still they call in vain. 

1 In Johnson's penance for a boyish act of disobedience one feels 
the genuine heart-Jbeats of the pious doctor. "Once, indeed, I was 
disobedient; I refused to attend my father to Uttoxeter market. 
Pride was the source of that refusal, and the remembrance of it was 
painful. A few years ago, I desired to atone for this fault. I went 
to Uttoxeter in very bad weather, and stood for a considerable time 
bareheaded in the rain, on the spot where my father's stall used to 
stand. In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory." 

2 Logan's The Lovers pictures Harriet, who is about to flee 
with Henry, weeping sentimentally over her departure from the 
castle in which she was born. Bruce's Lochleven No More is con- 
ceived in a mood that emphasizes equally the pains of separation 
from native fields and from his boyish love Peggy. The legal au- 
thority William Blackstone pictures the man condemned to exile 
as turning about on an eminence that will shut him off from home. 
(A Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse): 

There, melting at the well-known view. 

Drops a last tear, and bids adieu. 
In an Elegy, Daniel Hayes vaguely connects the sentiment with in- 
herited misfortunes when he depicts the longing of the man who 
feels that he is probably expiating an impious act which was com- 



THE GROWING BOY 79 

ture the nostalgia of the sea-roving sailor. In Syr Martyn, 
Mickle incidentally notices a sea rover who had toiled on 
the seven seas for ten long years, cheered by the hope of 
revisiting his native soil. Arrived at his childhood home, 
he wandered over the meadow and in the shade of the elms 
by the streamlet, where he listened to the cawing rooks. 
Mickle enters into the spirit of the wanderer and makes a 
genuine effort to express the sentiment that prompts recol- 
lection of childhood haunts. 

In lines Composed by the Sea-Shore, Wordsworth ana- 
lyzes the common human emotions that lead to a desire 
for the happiness of obscurity. The specifically romantic 
attitude toward native fields sprang from this longing for 
quiet after the labors and disappointments of life. Words- 
worth holds that where realization of the dream is possible 
to men in many ordinary walks of life, the sailor is com- 
pelled to rest in the world of memory. On the restless sea 
the sailor, more than men elsewhere, knows how 

sad it is, in sight of foreign shores, 
Daily to think on old familiar doors. 
Hearths loved in childhood, and ancestral floors. 

It was common even in the classicist tradition to take 
notice of the normal human trait that leads men to think 

mitted perhaps by an ancestor, and which has brought upon him 
the curse of separation from friends in native fields. In a poem at- 
tributed to Burns, the Elegy on "Stella" (1787), the subject of which 
is supposed to be Mary Campbell, whose grave he visited in the 
kirkyard in the West Highlands, Burns's rising tears flow for the 
unhappy Stella who was stricken far from her loved friends. — 
Compare lines from one of Shenstone's Songs: 

Not more, the schoolboy that expires 

Far from his native home, requires 

To see some friend's familiar face, 

Or meet a parent's last embrace. 
Compare also Elinor (1799), one of Southey's Botany-Bay Eclogues. 



80 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

back affectionately to their childhood days. But the clas- 
sicists and their followers did not attach to the recollection 
any such mood as that of the romanticists. They may note 
how in manhood it is human to look with dear regard on 
childhood. But their observation refers merely to the com- 
monplace experience which Somerville expressed in his pre- 
face to The Chase: 'The old and infirm have at least this 
privilege, that they can recall to their minds those scenes of 
joy in which they once delighted. . . . The amusements 
of our youth are the boast and comfort of our declining 
years." 

In Birth-Day Verses on Mr. Ford, Swift voiced the pre- 
romantic attitude toward locality with reference to affection 
for native fields. 

She bid me, with a serious face, 
Be sure conceal the time and place ; 
And not my compliment to spoil, 
By calling this your native soil. 

Later he addresses Mr. Ford. 

Can you on Dublin look with scorn; 
Yet here were you and Ormond born. 

The following lines make clear the lack of sympathy which 
the classicists felt with what by the end of the century had 
become a commonplace in Romanticist verse. 

Oh! were but you and I so wise 

To see with Robert Grattan's eyes. 

Robin adores that spot of earth. 

That literal spot, which gave him birth, 

And swears Belcamp is, to his taste, 

As fine as Hampton Court at least. 

When to your friends you would enhance 

The praise of Italy or France, 

For grandeur, elegance, or wit. 

We gladly hear you, and submit: 



THE GROWING BOY 81 

But then, to come and keep a clutter 
For this or that side of the gutter. 
To live in this or the' other isle, 
We cannot think it worth your while; 
For, take it kindly or amiss, 
The difference but amounts to this, 
We bury on our side the Channel 
In linen, and you your's in flannel. ^ 

The essentially new element is the romantic emotion which 
was awakened by recollection of specific localities. This 
is extended so that companions of childhood are remembered 
in connection with native fields. Lifelong friendship is en- 
riched by recollection of childhood play. In Cowper's lines 
on Edward Thurlow, the promotion of his friend to the 
Lord High Chancellorship is enhanced by the recollection 
that his abilities had been recognized from the days when 
he was a fellow apprentice. Cowper's To Warren Hastings 
is attached, in the speaking title, to their schoolboy fellowship 
at Westminster. Cowper can not believe the accusations 
brought against his schoolmate, whom he had known when 
young to possess those gentle qualities which could not 
have made him "the worst of men." 

In Coming to the Country, Graeme identifies early friend- 
ship with native fields in a mood of personal reminiscence. 

1 Contrast On Revisiting the Place of my Nativity (1800), in 
which Robert Bloomfield tells how, after he had sighed for "Twelve 
successive Summers," he "heard the language of enchanting 
Spring," 

"Come to thy native groves and fruitful fields. 

* 

I've clothed them all; the very Woods where thou 

In infancy learn'dst praise from every bough." 
"Remoter bliss" no longer glows in his bosom, 

for I have heard and seen 

The long-remembered voice, the church, the green. 



82 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Hail, dear companions of my youthful days! 
Frequented hills and natal valleys, hail! 

The romantic emphasis is clear also in the mood and rhythm 
of Bruce's apostrophe to his friend Mr. George Anderson in 
Lochleven. He definitely associates their friendship with 
the district of Lochleven. 

Nor shall the Muse forget thy friendly heart, 

O Lelius! partner of my youthful hours; 

How often, rising from the bed of peace, 

We would walk forth to meet the summer morn, 

Inhaling health and harmony of mind; 

Philosophers and friends; while science beamed 

With ray divine as lovely on our minds 

As yonder orient sun, whose welcome light 

Revealed the vernal landscape to the view. 

Yet oft, unbending from more serious thought, 

Much of the looser follies of mankind, 

Hum'rous and gay, we'd talk, and much would laugh ; 

While, ever and anon, their foibles vain, 

Imagination offered to our view. 

Jago's attachment to Shenstone was enhanced by the 
thought of their having been associated in youthful toil at 
Solihul, where Shenstone had called Jago with friendly voice 
from giddy sports to follow him ''intent on better themes." 
In Edge Hill, Jago recalls their congenial pursuits 

On Cherwell's banks, by kindred science nursed. 

Southey unbends as far as his temperament allows him, 
in the lines To Margaret Hill (1798), when he recalls de- 
lightful companionship with his cousin in childhood. 
Though he has not seen her for many years, he owes lier a 
debt of kindness. 

For you and I 
Grew up together, and, when we look back 
Upon old times, our recollections paint 
The same familiar faces. 



THE GROWING BOY 83 

If he had the power of Merlin he would "make brave witch- 
craft" and carry her back with him to the play hours of their 
carefree childhood when they played with a Noah's ark, 
read in "Pilgrim's Progress," or lived free as on an island 
where no mariner might disturb them. 

In such a blessed isle 
We might renew the days of infancy, 
And life, like a long childhood, pass away 
Without one care. 

The association of life-long friendship and native fields 
finds its classical statement in Auld Lang Syne. |The frank 
human loyalty of a friendship that has stood the severe tests 
of separation in time and place has nowhere else in English 
literature found such unaffected expression. The warm- 
hearted peasant poet, who was human and a good com- 
panion always, felt the emotion in its purity, and expressed 
it without embellishment or adornment in the simple rhythm 
of folk song. Every line has the air of finality and univer- 
sality characteristic of a classic. Its place is secure in the 
ritual of friendship. 

We twa hae run about the braes, 

And pou'd the gowans fine; 
But we've wandered many a weary fitt. 

Sin' auld lang syne. 

We twa hae paidl'd in the burn, 

Frae morning sun till dine; 
But seas between us braid hae roared 

Sin' auld lang syne. 

Wordsworth emphasizes the personal element. Dorothy 
is dearer to Wordsworth because of their companionship 
when she was "A little Prattler among men." He gives ex- 
pression to this mood in his tribute to Dorothy in The Spar- 
rcmfs Nest (1801), when he recalls 



84 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The Sparrow's dwelling, which, hard by 

My Father's house, in wet or dry 

My sister Emmeline and I 

Together visited. 

* 

The Blessing of my later years 

Was with me when a boy. 

Fate, however, has not always allowed the poet to take 
a "cup o' kindness" with his life-long friend. The poet 
must often in later years mourn the loss of his childhood 
friend. In his monody on the death of William Arnot 
(Daphnis: A Monody), Bruce regrets that the promise of 
youthful friendship as revealed in their early companion- 
ship has not been fulfilled. 

Oft by the side of Leven's crystal Lake, 

Trembling beneath the closing lids of light, 

With slow short-measured steps we took our walk. 

* 

O, happy days ! — for ever, ever gone ! 

When o'er the flowery green we ran, we played 

With blooms bedropped by youthful Summer's hand; 

Or, in the willow's shade, 

We mimic castles built among the sand, 

Soon by the sounding surge to be beat down. 

In tracing the emergence of the childhood theme it is 
fascinating to note how transition poets grafted tender 
shoots of thought and emotion on the classicist stock. At 
times the classicist element predominates, especially in the 
poet's inability to create a new vocabulary that will ade- 
quately express his novel emotions, with the result that he 
must have recourse to stock poetic diction; or, as in the 
twilight musings of the sensitive Collins, divinations of the 
introspective attitude are daintily shadowed forth in a deli- 
cate lacework of classical allusions. (Bruce's To a Fountain 
is especially interesting in its indications of the slow pro- 



THE GROWING BOY 85 

cess of separation that took place between traditional and 
new poetic material. Bruce's poem shows him to be a 
transition poet in whom the combined backward look and 
romantic vision lead almost to a confusion of treatment. 
The opening stanzas indicate that he was prompted by affec- 
tion for native fields; yet he could not break away from 
expression of conventional pastoral love for his Anna, his 
play companion, who is addressed as "Young Naiad of the 
vale." 

Then in simple language that suggests the later roman- 
ticists, Bruce gives a clear statement of recollection of his 
happy childhood, together with a more conventional glimpse 
of the age of innocence. 

Fount of my native wood ! thy murmurs greet 
My ear, like poet's heavenly strain : 
Fancy pictures in a dream 
The golden days of youth. 

O state of innocence ! O paradise ! 
In Hope's gay garden, Fancy views 
Golden blossoms, golden fruits, 
And Eden ever green. 

This suggests still another motive of special interest here — 
that of friendship: 

Where now, ye dear companions of my youth ! 
Ye brothers of my bosom ! where 
Do ye tread the walks of life, 
Wide scattered o'er the world? 

In the midst of the closing stanzas, which show a tendency 
toward eighteenth-century moralizing, he gives expression 
to the consolation that comes from romantic contemplation 
of external nature mingled with the gleam that the poet's 
imagination brings to nature. 



86 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

But Hope's fair visions, and the beams of Joy, 
Shall cheer my bosom: I will sing 
Nature's beauty, Nature's birth. 

In the face of his loss he will be inspired by visions that 
are fair as the landscapes of heavenly bliss. If his diction 
and poetic method reveal dependence on tradition, the 
forward look is nevertheless unmistakable in the predomi- 
nant mood, which emphasizes recollection of locality in con- 
nection with childhood, and which is expressed with a high 
seriousness that involves suggestions of nature worship set 
forth in the language of religion. 

Mickle's elegy on his brother {Pollio, 1762) was sug- 
gested when the poet revisited the woods and streams of 
their childhood play. His heart is charged with grief at 
sight of familiar scenes. 

Oft with the rising sun, when life was new, 

Along the woodland have I roamed with thee; 

Oft by the moon have brushed the evening dew, 
When all was fearless innocence and glee. 

The sainted well, where yon bleak hill declines. 
Has oft been conscious of those happy hours; 

But now the hill, the river crowned with pines. 

And sainted well, have lost their cheering powers : 

For thou art gone — My guide, my friend, oh ! where. 
Where hast thou fled, and left me here behind? 

My tenderest wish, my heart to thee was bare, 
Oh, now cut off each passage to thy mind. 

It would be unjust to Mickle to compare his lines with Ten- 
nyson's on Arthur Hallam, yet he gives simple expression 
to a deep sense of irreparable loss, in lines that turn to 
familiar scenes with an appreciation of external nature as a 
witness to the friendship that has been severed by death. 



i 



THE GROWING BOY 87 

From the time of Bruce to the nineties, the taste for auto- 
biographical reminiscence grew steadily. ^ Logan's In 
Autumn expresses the poet's sense of loss upon visiting 
''well known streams," "wonted groves," and "hospitable 
hall." 

My steps, when innocent and young, 

These fairy paths pursued ; 
And, wandering o'er the wild, I sung 

My fancies to the wood. 

As a child he wept tenderly over "imaged woes," little know- 
ing that "real life" was itself a "tragic tale." As he 
wanders among familiar scenes he hears no voice hailing 
"A stranger to his native bowers." 

Companions of the youthful scene, 

Endeared from earHest days ! 
With whom I sported on the green, 

Or roved the woodland maze! 
Long-exiled from your native clime, 
Or by the thunder-stroke of Time 

Snatched to the shadows of despair; 
I hear your voices in the wind. 

Your forms in every walk I find, 
I stretch my arms : ye vanish into air ! 

In an early poem. The Retrospect (1796), Southey ex- 
presses the utter loneliness of the mature man in scenes 
which were familiar in childhood, and among which he had 
hoped to realize again the pleasure and friendship of school- 
days. Memory's "busy eye" had often reconstructed 

Each little vestige of the well-known place; 
Each wonted haunt and scene of youthful joy, 
Where merriment had cheered the careless boy; 

1 Although Wordsworth's choice of subject in The Prelude may 
have been influenced by Rousseau's Confessions, it is not necessary 
to take that book into account here, as the native development in 
poetry is clearly marked before the appearance of the Confessions. 



88 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Well pleased will fancy still the spot survey 
Where once he triumphed in the boyish play, 
Without one care where every morn he rose, 
Where every evening sunk to calm repose. 

Upon returning to familiar scenes, he finds that he is a 
stranger : 

Where whilom all were friends I stand alone, 
Unknowing all I saw, of all I saw unknown. 

On My Own Miniature Picture Taken at Tzvo Years of 
Age (1796) develops the backv^ard look in a less sombre 
vein. As he contemplates the miniature, Southey is re- 
minded of the changes that have taken place in himself and 
his friends. Was he once like the picture? Were the 
glowing cheeks, the pleasure-sparkling eyes, and the smooth 
brow really his? Years have wrought a strange alteration. 

Of the friends 
Who once so dearly prized this miniature, 
And loved it for its likeness, some are gone 
To their last home; and some, estranged in heart. 
Beholding me, with quick-averted glance 
Pass on the other side. 

The elegiac strain was developed by Lamb in The Old 
Familiar Faces (1798) in a mood of restrospective regret 
stimulated by poignant grief that excluded classicalities and 
also whimsical lines like those of Thomas Hood in *T re- 
member, I remember." Lamb mourns the loss of more 
than one friend: 

I have had playmates, I have had companions, 

In my days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays — 

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

He loved the fairest among women, but 

Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her. 



THE GROWING BOY 89 

Although he may still laugh and carouse with his bosom 
cronies, he must continue to pace ghost-like the haunts of 
his childhood, and think of his friends how 

Some they have died, and some they have left me, 
And some are taken from me ; all are departed ; 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

In Wordsworth's lines on his school companion who 
"Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls," local feeling is 
stronger than that of severed friendship. ^ 

Swift, who was willing to tolerate praise of the elegance 
and wit of France and Italy, would have had scant sym- 
pathy with modern sentimental journeys to the homes of 
English men of letters. Yet long before the close of the 
century Scott of Amwell's interest in Collins prompted 
a journey to Chichester to find the grave of the poet. In 
the year of Swift's death, Akenside in the Ode to the Muse 
recalls his early days when the muse set him aglow with 
prophetic heat which he no longer feels. 

Where all the bright mysterious dreams 

Of haunted groves and tuneful streams, 

That woo'd my genius to divinest themes? 

He asks for a free poetic hour among the duties which 
promise him fame as a physician. As he writes, he feels 
himself again possessed by the spirit of poetry, and his 
bosom burns. 

Such on the banks of Tyne, confessed, 

I hailed the fair immortal guest. 

When first she sealed me for her own. 

In less than a year after Swift's death, Collins published 
the Ode to Pity (1746), in which he sentimentally notices 
the birthplace of Otway by the river Arun. In this poem 
Collins has in fact voiced those emotions which, in their 

1 The Prelude, Book III. 



90 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

association with the poet's recollection of his own birth- 
place and boyhood days, are an essential element in the 
specifically romantic feeling for native fields. (Collins im- 
plores Pity to receive his humble strains in the name of 
Euripides, who composed his tragedies by the side of distant 
Ilissus. Then he wonders why he should find it necessary 
to roam in fancy by the side of that deserted stream: 
his native Arun has heard the plaints of a poet. 

Wild Arun, too, has heard thy strains, 
And echo, 'midst my native plains, 
Been soothed by pity's lute. 

There first the wren thy myrtles shed 
On gentlest Otway's infant head, 

To him thy cell was shown; 
And while he sung the female heart, 
With youth's soft notes unspoiled by art, 

Thy turtles mixed their own. 

The susceptible Lovibond responded to this motive in 
Verses zvritten after passing through Findon, Sussex, iy68. 
Findon was the birthplace of his teacher, the Rev. Mr. 
Woodeson. 

Woodeson! these eyes have seen thy natal earth, 
Thy Findon, sloping from the southern downs; 
Have blessed the roof ennobled by thy birth. 

Emotional recollection of the poet's birthplace is most 
frequently attached to childhood love of rivers and streams. 
The transitional poets were especially susceptible to running 
water, and Wordsworth's recollections of his own childhood 
are indissolubly associated with the lakes and streams of 
Lancashire and Westmoreland. ^ 

1 Coleridge's The Brook was to have traced one of the Quan- 
tock streams from its source to its mouth in the Bristol Channel. 
The notes and maps made by Coleridge subjected him to annoyance 
from agents of the British government, who suspected that he was 



THE GROWING BOY 91 

Thomas Warton's charming sonnet To the River Lodon 
foreshadows Wordsworth in that Warton reveals attachment 
to the river with which he had been familiar in early child- 
hood. He recalls the banks of Lodon as fairy ground; it 
was there that his muse first lisped. In his memory the 
stream has become idealized through association with the 
pleasures of childhood ; nowhere has he found skies and sun 
so pure as near his sweet native stream.^ Langhorne apos- 
trophizes the Tweed as the favored stream on the banks of 
which Thomson gathered flowers in childhood. Although the 
early poets did not amplify their recollection to the extent of 
Wordsworth in The Prelude and other poems like the Dud- 
don sonnets, they were nevertheless prone to recall the 
first exercise of the poetic faculty in connection with their 
rovings in the meadows or woodlands by the side of a 
stream. Mason takes this lead so frequently that the 
reader tires of constant reminders of his wanderings on the 
banks of his favorite stream, a tributary of the Humber. 

making topographical memoranda of military value to the French. 
(Is there, possibly, a connection between the interest in childhood 
and the fondness for "sources" and "springs" and "fountains"?) — 
Compare also Collins's Ode on the Popular Superstitions: 

Ye splendid friths and lakes, which, far away. 

Are by smooth Annan filled or pastoral Tay, 

Or Don's romantic springs, at distance hail. 

Compare also, Samuel Marsh Oram's To the River Stour, 
"Where Fielding oft musing delighted to rove." 

1 J. G. Cooper recalls how he wandered as an infant by Trent's 
"pellucid streams." On his sick-bed Smollett reverted in thought 
to his native Leven-water : 

Pure stream! in whose transparent wave 

My youthful limbs I wont to lave. 

No torrents stain thy hmpid source; 

No rocks impede thy dimpling course, 

That sweetly warbles o'er its bed. 



92 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Langhoriie and Bruce reveal special fondness for native 
streams/ John Langhorne was born at Kirkby Stephen in 
1735, and was first sent to a school at Winton, in Westmore- 
land, and later to one at Appleby, until the age of eighteen. 
He was thus brought under the influence of the same na- 
tural scenery as Wordsworth. In the closing stanza of his 
lines to the Genius of Westmoreland he dedicates, while in 
his native shades retired, his votive lay to the spirit which 
had stimulated his youthful endeavors, and from which he 
had caught the sacred fire. It was none other than the 
'^hidden power of these wild groves." As early as 1759 
he added to the numerous detached poems dedicated to 
rivers, his address To the River Eden. Though thickly 
overlaid with "diction" and classicist embellishments, true 
feeling is suggested in the opening stanzas, addressed to 
Delightful Eden ! parent stream ! 

In a pastoral vein he mourns lost love and friendship, but 
says that 

'Tis yet some joy to think of thee. 

He too had strayed pensively along the "mazy shore," and 
would paint those scenes again where he had played with 
infant joy. Although Langhorne often echoes Thomson, 
he could be as definite as Wordsworth in recalling specific 
locality. 

A Fareufell Hymn to the Valley of Invan indicates the 
extent to which Langhorne had freed himself from classicist 
vocabulary. Although he is obviously inspired by romantic 
emotions, his expression is not always, to the same extent as 
in this hymn, characteristic of the freer vocabulary of later 
writers. In this poem (which in its mood may be con- 

^ Wordsworth believed that Langhorne's poetry was not held 
in as high esteem as it should be (K. Lienemann, Die Belesenheit 
von William Wordsivorth. BerHn, 1908, p. 91). 



THE GROWING BOY 93 

sidered to suggest Wordsworth's farewell to his native re- 
gions) he succeeds in phrasing his thought without classi- 
cal embellishment. Like Bruce he has come under the 
influence of Collins and Gray in his love for the hour of 
twilight, which was favorable to sentimental musings. But 
at the same time he also provides an early parallel for 
Wordsworth's loving recollection of spots endeared to him 
in childhood. His musings had led him through the fields 
of Irwan's vale, where he listened to the song of the black- 
bird. He must now bewail the loss of these pleasures. 
Like Wordsworth, although without his power of expres- 
sion, he will prize the memory of his experiences. 

Yet still, within yon vacant grove, 

To mark the close of parting day; 
Along yon flow'ry banks to rove, 

And watch the wave that winds away; 
Fair Fancy sure shall never fail, 
Tho' far from these, and Irwan's vale ! 

Although Bruce sings of many streams, he does so with 
special delight of his native Gairney. Michael Bruce was 
born in 1746 in a little hamlet on the banks of Lochleven in 
Kinrossshire. In Lochleven (1766) he set out to record 

the dear remembrance of his native fields 

before a slow disease carried him ofif at the age of twenty- 
one as one of the minor inheritors of unfulfilled renown. 
Like other transition poets, the sensitive Bruce pointed the 
way for the early and late romantic poets who were pre- 
occupied with the expression of their love of external na- 
ture. His desire was to make immortal the rivers of his 
youth; they shall flow "in thy poet's lays." Beauty dwells 
ever-blooming on the banks of Leven ; and he first tuned 
his Doric reed on the banks of the sweetly-winding Gairney. 
His twilight musings were probably stimulated by the 



94 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

''sweet-complaining" Gray ; and his debt to Thomson is clear 
in his lofty conception of divine joy and goodness in external 
nature. He recognizes an omnipresent creator who is 

Ever present through the peopled space 

Of vast Creation's infinite extent, 

Pours life, and bliss, and beauty, pours Himself, 

His own essential goodness, o'er the minds 

Of happy beings, thro' ten thousand worlds. 

Bruce's lines, which lead into his address to his childhood 
friend Lelius, indicate that Wordsworth was the crown of a 
development that linked the recollection of childhood with 
the infinite goodness and powers of the universe. ^ 

Nearly forty years before The Prelude, Bruce wrote in 
Lochleven an autobiographical poem that suggests a loving 
remembrance of childhood days among beautiful natural 
surroundings. The typical descriptions of Thomson have 
given way to the personal point of view ; Bruce has defi- 
nitely connected external nature with the individual exper- 
ience. 

Still as I mount, the less'ning hills decline. 

Till high above them northern Grampius lifts 

His hoary head, bending beneath a load 

Of everlasting snow. O'er southern fields 

I see the Cheviot hills. . . . 

But chief mine eye on the subjected vale 

Of Leven pleased looks down. 

Although Akenside's Ode to the Muse (1745) contains 
perhaps the earliest extended personal recollection of native 
fields, the romantic longing to be again a child does not 
appear in the earlier form of his Pleasures of the Imagina- 

1 Wordsworth possessed Bruce's poems as collected by Ander- 
son. Dorothy read Lochleven in 1801. Wordsworth wished to see 
a monument erected on the banks of Lochleven, "to the memory of 
the innocent and tender-hearted Michael Bruce." (Lienemann, op. 
cit, p. 165.) 



THE GROWING BOY 95 

Hon. The growth of sentiment during the intervening years 
is reflected in the revised form of this poem. In the 
uncompleted fourth book of the revised version (1770), 
where Akenside set himself the task of exploring the secret 
paths of early genius, he wonders where youthful poets 
now invoke the muse, and associates them at once with 
rivers. 

What wild river's brink at eve 

Imprint your steps? 

This thought stimulated the wish that he might again as in 
his youth be with them. 

— -Would I again were with you! — O ye dales 
Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where 
Oft as the giant flood obliquely strides, 
And his banks open, and his lawns extend. 
Stops short the pleased traveler to view. 
* 

ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook 
The rocky pavement and the mossy falls 
Of solitary Wensbeck's limpid stream ; 
How gladly I recall your well-known seats 
Beloved of old, and that delightful time 
When all alone, for many a summer's day, 

1 wandered through your calm recesses, led 
In silence by some powerful hand unseen! 

In the poet's notice of the activities of the growing boy, 
there is a change, then, from generalized recollection to 
Akenside's extended treatment, and to Southey's well- 
defined autobiographical attitude toward early childhood. 
In Akenside's apostrophe to the Wensbeck and the dales 
of Tyne, which suggests definitely the rhythm and mood of 
Wordsworth, there is no longer mere juxtaposition of mood 
and incident, but instead a fusion of both elements. The way 
has been clearly marked for Wordsworth's mood in the 
poem which in the chronological arrangement of his poems 



96 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

appears as the first. It is the conclusion of the poem he 
wrote in 1786 in anticipation of leaving Hawkeshead with 
the vale of Esthwaite and his native regions. In these 
youthful lines he clearly foreshadows the mood of The Pre- 
lude. He feels with fervid emotion, 

That, wheresoe'er my steps may tend. 
And whensoever my course shall end, 
If in that hour a single tie 
Survive of local sympathy, 
My soul will cast the backward view, 
The longing look alone on you. 



CHAPTER III 
CHILDREN OF THE POOR 

The extent to which poets had prepared the way for 
Wordsworth's recollection of his own childhood is evident 
in their sentiment for native fields. Another manifestation 
of Wordsworth's profound interest in childhood appears in 
his constructive suggestions for ameliorating the condition 
of the children of the poor. The influences which helped to 
shape his views are felt in poetry as early as Thomson's 
Seasons. 

Constant repetition of the difference between the man- 
made city and the God-given beauty of the country reveals 
an ethical concept of increasing power in eighteenth-cen- 
tury poetry. In the contrast, city life is always unfavorably 
depicted: natural man has no opportunity to realize himself 
under artificial conditions of city life. ^ This attitude can 
be understood in the light of philosophical tendencies that 
influenced poets. Hobbes had developed a philosophy which 
asserted that man is by nature selfish, and that compassion 
is a sign of weakness. To curb this selfishness of the in- 
dividual he had advocated a strong central government. 
The new stimulus felt by poets with whose work this study 
is concerned, derived not from the egoistic philosophy of 
Hobbes or the orthodox teachings of the church on 
original sin, which emphasized the imperfections of na- 
tural man, but from the philosophy of the Earl of Shaftes- 

1 Compare Thomson's early poem Of a Country Life, begin- 
ning, 

I hate the clamours of the smoky towns. 
See also Nathaniel Cotton's The Fireside. 



^5 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

bury, who asserted the doctrine of natural goodness/ 
Thomson's harmony of all created beings derives from 
Shaftesbury's identification of the good and the beautiful. 
In this conception God, who is held to be sufficiently re- 
vealed in natural phenomena, is the embodiment of good- 
ness ; he is the spirit of love, in which is implied benevolence 
towards man, whom he created for happiness. Compassion, 
therefore, is not a weakness, but a virtue ; for if man is by 
nature a virtuous being, he must respect his fellow man and 
promote his happiness. To lack compassion is to be out of 
harmony with nature, which is beautiful. The essence of 
Shaftesbury's philosophy in those ethical aspects which are 
especially to be noted in the poetry with which the following 
paragraphs are concerned, is that the benevolent impulses 
of natural man are spontaneous and instinctive. 

To Shaftesbury may be traced the vigorous interest in 
philanthropy which animates the poetry of the century.^ 
His emphasis on the social affections stimulated poets. Al- 
though it has been said that Englishmen were deeply inter- 
ested in abolishing negro slave traffic at the very time when 
women and, especially, children were condemned to indus- 
trial slavery, it must be remembered that those poets who 
used benevolence as their slogan were a mighty force in the 
awakening of social consciousness, the results of which 
were remedial measures and legislation by which children 
benefited. Mandeville's coarse attack on Shaftesbury's 
Characteristics had emphasized the repulsive features of the 
philosophy of Hobbes. The cynicism of the pessimistic 
Mandeville went so far as to question the right of children 

^ Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. (1711). 

2 Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England, 1700-1760, 
by C. A. Moore. Publications of the Modern Language Asso- 
ciation of America, 1916. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 99 

of the poor to what Httle education had been provided for 
them in charity schools during the reign of Queen Anne. 
Poets did not follow Mandeville. It is clear, however, that 
native influences determined their interest in benevolence 
before Rousseau added his strength to their cause after 
1760. ^ In fact, even before the middle of the century, 
preoccupation with ethical problems amounts almost to 
a convention. The readiness with which poets responded 
to benevolence is to be explained, furthermore, on the basis 
of social conditions. Luxury had been on the increase 
even before 1763, when England definitely took its place as 
the first power among nations. The industrial revolution 
increased poverty and unrest among the masses. A new 
age was coming into being, and sensitive poets reflected the 
pains of the new birth. Their sensibilities were aroused by 
wrongs which they saw in the social readjustment. 

The extent of their interest in universal benevolence is 
manifested in sympathetic notice of orphans, and in at- 
tacks on luxury and deplorable conditions attributed to the 
rise of industry. But before they awakened to practical 
problems, poets had been sensitive to the abuse of animals. 
In fact, before 1750, poets had awakened more fully to 
abuses of birds and animals than to hardships of children of 
the poor. It will be necessary, therefore, to note first of all 
how sympathy for children was closely bound up with 
compassion for animals. 

1 Shaftesbury's influence continued strong up to the time of 
the Revolution. When, however, the democratic implications of his 
philosophy became obvious in the audacious presentation of Rousseau 
and Paine, and in the events of the Revolution itself, his popularity 
at once declined. Eleven editions of the Characteristics appeared 
between 171 1 and 1790, but after 1790 no new edition appeared until 
1870. (Characteristics, edited by John M. Robertson, 2 vols., Lon- 
don, 1900J 



100 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

I 

Thomson and those who like him exalted rural simplicity 
at the expense of city manners, found congenial matter in 
animal life. Unlike animals, man had under the baneful 
influence of artificial society drifted far from his natural self. 
His instincts had become dulled to such an extent that, for 
instance, he neglected even his offspring in order to satisfy 
a craving for luxury and pleasure. He prefers smoky 
cities and palaces to sheltering groves, warm caves, and 
deep-sunk valleys. ^ God's forests stand neglected for the 
comforts of civilization. In Fdshion, Joseph Warton 
scorns artificial pleasures : the fashionable woman has lost 
sight of natural instincts. Warton would lead her to imi- 
tate the loyalty of animals to their young. At ten in the 
morning the fashionable woman drinks chocolate and strokes 
Fop, her lap dog ; - she rises at noon, and after an elaborate 
toilette dines at three. 

Meanwhile her babes with some foul nurse remain ; 

For modern dames a mother's cares disdain; 

Each fortnight once she bears to see the brats, 

Tor oh! they stun one's ears like squalling cats.' 

Tigers and pards protect and nurse their young, 

The parent snake will roll her forked tongue, 

The vulture hovers vengeful o'er her nest, 

If the rude hand her helpless brood infest; 

Shall lovely woman, softest frame of heaven, 

To whom were tears and feeling pity given, 

Most fashionably cruel, less regard 

Her offspring than the vulture, snake, and pard? 

1 J, Warton: The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature (1740). 

2 Compare Somerville's The Chase (1735) : 

the rustic dames 
Shall at thy kennel wait, and in their laps 
Receive thy growing hopes, with many a kiss 
Caress, and dignify their little charge 
With some great title. . . . 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 101 

Isaac Watts distinguishes between children who are sin- 
ful, and animals that reflect the glory of God. It is not in 
itself significant that the emmet and bee are held up as 
models, because Watts's purpose is didactic ; but plants and 
animals are also referred to as containing the essence of 
their maker's goodness, which children are taught to see 
in nature. Watts can see beauty and goodness everywhere 
except in the heart of the child, between whom and external 
nature he recognizes a breach. In Address to the Deity he 
is unable to think of man as part of the beauty of the created 
universe ; yet 

Beast and birds with laboring throats 
Teach us a God in thousand notes. 

Watts seems in fact to be groping for a religious mood 
that shall, like the sentimental contemplation of romantic 
poets, mysteriously reveal God through the heart. Because 
of the inhibition which the doctrine of natural depravity puts 
upon him, he is unable to complete the circle. The result 
is a cleavage between the child and the beauties of nature 
that are lauded in Praise for Creation and Providence 
(1720). Against Pride in Clothes strikes the balance 
against the child, whom Watts does not make a partaker in 
the goodness and beauty of nature. The child is made 
to say, 

The tulip and the butterfly 

Appear in gayer coats than I; 

Let me be dressed fine as I will, 

Flies, worms, and flowers exceed me still. ^ 

Humanitarian conceptions find no place in Somer- 
ville's The Chase, which voices the traditional sentiment of 

1 Cp. Cotton's The Beau and the Viper: 
What if I show that only man 
Appears defective in the plan ! 



102 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

country gentlemen who believe that animals were created 
for man, and that he is their master.^ 

Thomson, on the other hand, disapproves of the hunt be- 
cause it wantonly interferes with the happiness to which all 
created beings are entitled. In Winter he notices the hunter 
only to condemn him. Helpless birds merit the protection 
of man. When the spirit of universal benevolence is mani- 
fest in nature in early spring, birds are the first to sing of 
love. Even birds whose note is harsh and discordant when 
heard alone — like the jays, rooks, and daws — ^merge har- 
moniously into the chorus of song. Thomson lovingly 
names over the list of romantic birds, and in terms of do- 
mestic life describes their mating, nesting, and raising of 
the young. He does not omit to focus his lines on the self- 
sacrifice of parent birds who unselfishly bear the most de- 
licious morsels to their nestlings ; and he brings home the 
humanitarian thesis in the closing illustration of poverty- 
stricken cottagers who check their appetites to give their 
children food.- 



1 The brute creation are his property, 
Subservient to his will, and for him made : 
As hurtful these he kills, as useful those 
Preserves; their sole and arbitrary king. 

(The Chase, Book IV) 

2 Yet in the episode of the starved Pyrennean wolves that 
scour the countryside, Thomson recognizes the ferocity of animals 
bent on prey: 

Rapacious, at the mother's throat they fly. 
And tear the screaming infant from her breast. 
Although protesting against man's cruelty, later poets are not blind 
to the cruelty of nature. In Sensibility, Burns hears 
the woodlark charm the forest, 

Telling o'er his little joys; 
But alas! a prey the surest 

To each pirate of the skies. (Continued) 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 103 

Smollett's satire bears witness to widespread sympathy 
for animals. Before the influence of Rousseau had been 
felt, Smollett had burlesqued Lyttleton's Monody (1747). 
His Burlesque Ode failed, however, to stem the ever in- 
creasing tide of sentimental tears. To ascribe Shaw's 
Monody (1768) and Ode to the Nightingale (1771) wholly 
to the influence of Rousseau is to ignore the persistent na- 
tive influence of Shaftesbury and Thomson, and the direct 
connection which Shaw himself establishes between his 
poems and the Monody of Lyttleton. ^ 

Lovibond brings native benevolist teachings definitely 
into connection with childhood. In Rural Sports he casti- 
gates man for lack of feeling towards animals, and then 
points to children who lure barnyard fowl only to feed them. 
In the fresh sunshine of early morning all creation swells 
the chorus of delight and love. Not so with those who 
wreak havoc by cheering the baying pack. Lovibond has 
visions of the unity of man and animal creation ("For con- 
cord, for the harmonious whole") that was to stir Coleridge 
and Wordsworth. He is not content to rest in a negative 

The image of the hawk as the enemy of domestic happiness 
is used again in Bonie Jean and How Cruel are the Parents. 
Mason's English Garden has an interesting passage that shows how 
the hawk preys upon the mother bird. Mason thinks back to the 
golden age when the law of tooth and claw did not prevail. Scott 
faced unpalatable facts in Approach of Winter: 

Who dreams of Nature, free from Nature's strife? 

Who dreams of constant happiness below? 
The hope-flushed enterer on the stage of life; 
The youth to knowledge unchastised by woe. 

1 Although Henry Brooke's Universal Beauty (1735) does not 
notice childhood, Brooke's appeal for universal harmony, and his 
praise of insects, together with moral lessons that he derives from 
animal life, suggest the attitude of J. Warton, whose comparison 
between animals and man is unfavorable to man. 



104 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

attitude of condemnation, but asks man to observe the 
instinctive humanity of children: 

beneath thy porch, in social joy 
Sit and approve thy infant's virtuous haste, 
Humanity's sweet tones while all employ 
To lure the winged domestics to repast. 

The parent should learn from his children to avoid wan- 
ton killing of God's creatures, and instead 

Let Heaven's best joy be thine, benevolence. 
The closing lines foreshadow the moral of Coleridge's stan- 
zas in The Ancient Mariner, in which the later poet moral- 
izes the experience of the sailor who had violated the law 
of love that permeates the universe. Lovibond teaches that 
it is God's decree, instinctively obeyed by children, 

To spare thy own, nor shed another's blood: 
Heaven breathes benevolence, to all, to thee; 
Each being's bliss consummates general good. 

The significance of Rural Sports lies in its use of children 
to represent the ideal state to which man must aspire if he 
wishes to live according to the laws of nature. 

Where Lovibond held up the farmer's children as an 
ideal of benevolence, Beattie's Minstrel (1771) definitely 
portrays in Edwin an individual child who responds to the 
ideals of sentimental humanitarianism. 

His heart, from cruel sport estranged, would bleed 
To work the woe of any living thing. 
By trap, or net, by arrow or by sling; 
These he detested ; those he scorned to wield : 
He wished to be the guardian, not the king, 
Tyrant far less, or traitor of the field ; 
And sure the silvan reign unbloody joy might yield. 

In Beattie the change from Somerville's conception of man 
as the sole and arbitrary king to the sentimental view of 
man as the guardian, indicates the difference between two 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 105 

outlooks on life. In the poetic treatment of children it in- 
dicates the triumph of Shaftesbury's teachings of universal 
benevolence. ^ 

Burns, Cowper, and Southey, of the later group of poets, 
were alive to the sufferings of animals. In his lines To a 
Mouse, Burns talks to the field mouse as tenderly as he 
would to a hurt child, and mourns over the fact that man 
has broken natural ties. In The Wounded Hare he in- 
vokes a curse upon the man who hunts hares during the 
breeding season. Among the passages that condemn the 
hunter of wild animals, this is one of the most vigorous. 
Burns's letter to Cunningham reveals the sincerity of his 
indignation.^ He develops the motive in terms of domestic 
Hfe: 

Perhaps a mother's anguish adds its woe; 
The playful pair crowd fondly by thy side; 
Ah ! helpless nurslings, who will now provide 

That life a mother only can bestow ! 

^ Compare Thomas Blacklock, one of the chief benevolists, who 
banished the hunt from the neighborhood of his cottage, and wished 
to trace "Kind Nature's laws with sacred Ashley." Cp. Bruce's 
Elegy to Spring: 

Thus Ashley gathered Academic bays; 

Thus gentle Thomson as the Seasons roll, . . . 
But contrast the boy in Robert Bedingfield's The Education of 
Achilles, who was accustomed "To grasp with tender hand the 
pointed spear." 

2 "One morning lately, as I was out pretty early in the fields, 
sowing some grass-seeds, I heard the burst of a shot from a 
neighboring plantation, and presently a poor little wounded hare 
came crippling by me. You will guess my indignation at the in- 
human fellow who could shoot a hare at this season, when all of 
them have young ones. Indeed, there is something in this business 
of destroying, for our sport, individuals in the animal creation that 
do not injure us materially, which I could never reconcile to my ideas 
of virtue." 



106 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Cowper's defense of animals reflects the humanitarian 
implications of the evangelical revival. He pleads for the 
protection of bird and beast, not on the basis of natural good- 
ness, but because he is prompted by Christian sympathy with 
the helpless. So he arrives by a different route at the same 
goal as those who follow Shaftesbury. Cowper's nature is 
so sensitive to abuse of animals, that he Observed with pain 
how a neighbor's children played with a pet leveret about 
three months old. As they understood "better how to 
tease the poor creature than to feed it," the poet received 
their father's consent to take it under his protection. 

The humanitarian thesis was uppermost in the mind 
of Southey, even when he expressed his personal attach- 
ment to the dog that had been the friend of his childhood. 
In the lines On the Death of a Favorite Old Spaniel, Southey 
lingers over recollections of childhood days spent in play 
with ''poor Phyllis." He writes with simple tenderness of 
his personal loss. 

thou hadst been 
Still the companion of my boyish sports; 
And, as I roamed o'er Avon's wooded cliffs, 
From many a day-dream has thy short, quick bark 
Recalled my wandering soul. I have beguiled 
Often the melancholy hours at school, 
Soured by some little tyrant, with the thought 
Of distant home, and I remembered then 
Thy faithful fondness; for not mean the joy. 
Returning at the happy holidays, 
I felt from thy dumb welcome. ^ 

When the gate last closed upon Southey as he left his pater- 
nal roof, Phyllis lost her truest friend, and no one was left 
to plead 

For the old age of brute fidelity. 

1 Compare Thomson's juvenile poem on his favorite sister 
and her cat : Lisy's Parting with her Cat. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 107 

The closing lines of this early poem reveal the revolu- 
tionary and antagonistic Southey who had not yet found 
himself in the conservative spirit which lay at the root of his 
character and which dominated his later life. His plea for 
animals is in harmony with that of the benevolists. 

Mine is no narrow creed; 
And He who gave thee being did not frame 
The mystery of life to be the sport 
Of merciless Man. There is another world 
For all that live and move, — a better one, 
Where the proud bipeds, who would fain confine 
INFINITE GOODNESS to the little bounds 
Of their own charity, may envy thee. 

Southey's heart, to use his own words, has a genuine warmth, 
though it smokes not ; his feelings are not mushroom feel- 
ings that spring up without seed and take no root. As a 
result, although he can not abandon himself to the spirit 
of universal benevolence as it has been observed in the 
poets who preceded him, he is apparently in full sympathy 
with their teachings.^ 

If the poet's escape from city to country seems like 
a weak or even selfish shrinking from responsibility, it must 
be remembered that before men were able to face the prob- 
lems of practical reform, their hearts had to be attuned to 
the sorrows of man and, especially, of animals, the sympa- 

1 Cp. Day's Sandford and Mertoun: "I believe, as I have before 
told you, there is no animal that may not be rendered mild and in- 
offensive by good usage." (I, 236) Thomas Day undertook to 
ride an unbroken colt, and was killed for his pains. — It has been the 
custom to point to Day's Sandford and Mertoun as an example of 
Rousseau's direct influence on English thought. After a careful 
examination, however, Jacques Pons concludes that Day has not 
held to the fundamentals of Rousseau's teachings, and that we are 
not justified in calling his book "The Little Emile" or "The 
English Emile." 



108 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

thetic observation of which was nursed in an environment 
favorable to the mood of universal benevolence. The poet's 
convictions were strengthened in remote hamlets from which 
as a vantage point the new message was sent to men who 
were moved to attempt practical reforms on individual 
initiative or through the agency of an organized institution 
like the church, or societies that grow out of church ac- 
tivities. Poets had to contend not only with conditions, but 
also with a state of mind that was responsible for those con- 
ditions. They fled from both when they left the city, but 
their message came back to city dwellers, many of whom 
were in the state of mind illustrated in the cynical letter of 
Lovelace to Bedford : "We begin, when boys, with birds ; 
and when grown up, go on to women ; and both, perhaps, 
in turn, experience our sportive cruelty." ^ If men were 
to be aroused to sympathy with the suffering of children, 
they had first to be awakened to a realization that kindness 
and love pervade all nature — even the nature which Somer- 
ville held to have been created for the sport of man. Poets, 
who were the earliest to awaken to a heartfelt brotherhood 
with animals, longed for the solitary places where cruelty 
and cynicism could not operate. It was the simple, feeling 
poet, nursed in solitude, who was destined to win men's 
hearts to consent to accept the spirit of benevolence as the 
moving force even in organized society. After the awaken- 
ing, men were ready, toward the close of the century, for 
practical reforms. 

II 
Readers of poetry in the eighteenth century must have 
responded to passages on childhood that now seem cold and 
conventional. In Prospect of Peace, Tickell writes of Bri- 
tain's heroes, 

1 Clarissa Harlowe. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 109 

At whose dire names ten thousand widows pressed 
Their helpless orphans clinging to the breast. 

The image of the widow and her orphans survives lustily 
in benevolist poetry. Although it is difficult for the modern 
reader to feel the emotional stimulus which the poet un- 
doubtedly intended, the lines on widows and orphans must 
have suggested a coloring of sentiment that moved tears 
and a just indignation against social wrongs.^ Those poets 
who felt social injustice, constantly employ traditional 
phrases in lines that are obviously meant to arouse com- 
passion. ^ Joseph Warton in Library calls upon his readers 
to "hark, how dying infants shriek." Scott in Recruiting 
"hates that drum's discordant sound," which suggests only 
burning towns and widows' tears and orphans' moans. 

Childhood in William Whitehead's Elegy written at the 
convent of Haut Fillers in Champagne, 1/34, is more vital- 
ly conceived than in Lovibond's Ode to Youth, J. Warton's 
The Revenge of America, or Graeme's Loss of the Aurora. 
On the banks of the Marne, the workman often recalls dis- 
astrous days when makers of war taught Christian zeal to 
authorize their crimes : 

Oft to his children sportive on the grass 
Does dreadful tales of worn tradition tell. 

1 Beilby Porteus's Death portrays such crashing ruin and de- 
vastation that there is 

not even a widow left 
To wail her sons. 

2 In like manner children are introduced in tragedy to heighten 
effect, as in Southerne's The Fatal Marriage, or The Innocent Adul- 
tery, and Oroonoko. In Home's Douglas the child appears on the 
stage to speak those appealing lines which long served in the schools 
as a favorite piece for declamation : 

My name is Norval : on the Grampian hills, 
My father feeds his flocks. . . . 



110 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Although Smollett's Tears of Scotland (1746) was con- 
ceived in horror of atrocities, the lines seem cold and con- 
ventional to the modern reader. Yet in its day the poem 
must have evoked tears through portrayal of the misfor- 
tunes of the poor. The wretched man who from afar sees 
his property destroyed by armies, ''Bethinks him of his babes 
and wife," and curses his fate. Infants perish in the field, 
and a parent who is driven to distraction sheds his children's 
blood. A mother who hears her helpless orphans cry for 
bread, 

Weeps o'er her tender babes and dies. 

Although Gay had observed slum children in London, 
he did not develop the humanitarian aspects of his material 
in the mood of Thomson and later poets. His treatment of 
London waifs has only a suggestion of the pathetic ele- 
ment which is prominent in Steele's sentimental sketches in 
the Tatler. The new ideal is expressed in Thomson's lines 
on Shaftesbury, who is 

The generous Ashley thine, the friend of man; 
Who scanned his nature with a brother's eye, 
His weakness prompt to shade, to raise his aim, 
To touch the finer movements of the mind. 
And with the moral beauty charm the heart. ^ 

Thomson, as a result, portrays conditions that add 
hardship to the sufferings of children. In the episode of 
the rider and horse who while benighted are lost in the 
bogs, the wife and ''plaintive children" vainly await the 
father's return.- In another familiar passage in Winter 
the father is overtaken by a snow-storm, and, "stung with 
thoughts of home," flounders in the drifts. Horror fills 

1 Summer. 

2 Autumn. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 111 

his heart when he reahzes that in place of being near his 
''tufted cottage rising through the snow," he is far from 
the beaten track. As he sinks helpless into the drift, 
thoughts of "tender anguish" overtake him. He thinks of 

His wife, his children, and his friends unseen. 

In vain for him the officious wife prepares 

The fire fair-blazing, and the vestment warm; 

In vain his little children, peeping out 

Into the mingling storm, demand their sire, 

With tears of artless innocence. Alas! 

Nor wife, nor children, more shall he behold. . . . 

Because he is awake to social wrongs, Thomson frankly 
makes himself the poetic advocate of the unfortunate and 
distressed by frequent and definite interest in charity. 'His 
philosophy of universal benevolence awakens a keen reali- 
zation that unassuming worth is neglected, and that the 
good man's share is often gall and bitterness. He faces 
the problem of 

Why the lone widow and her orphans pined 
In starving solitude; while luxury, 
In palaces, lay straining her low thought. 
To form unreal wants. 

He is not wholly conventional in Lord Talbot when that 
lord is praised for a love of justice that led him to cham- 
pion ''trampled want and worth" and defend "suffering 
right." His reward is the hig'hest tribute the helpless widow 
and her orphans can give, "The widow's sighs and orphan's 
tears" of gratitude. ^ 

1 Compare Fawkes's On the Death of the Earl of Uxbridge 
(1743). Blair in William Law praises the charitable work of Law 
and his fellow workers at Kings Clyffe. The spirit of benevolence 
is praised by Mackenzie in Man of the World: "their very errors 
were delightful . . . they were the errors of benevolence, genero- 
sity, and virtue." 



112 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

In the same mood Thomson hails the investigators on 
the jail committee of 1729 as benefactors of mankind, and 
calls upon them as true patriots to resume their work. He 
can not forget the generous band who were ''touched by 
human woe" to search the gloomy horrors of the jail, where, 
it must be recalled, incarcerated men lived with wife and 
children, as is clear from the Vicar of Wake-field. 

Institutional life of children also receives his attention. 
Among the blameless poor he does not overlook 

The helpless young that kiss no mother's hand. 

In Liberty he states his conception of the service to be ren- 
dered by public institutions. Referring to the Foundling 
Hospital, he arouses sympathy for the work of salvaging 
orphans : 

The dome resounding sweet with infant joy, 
From famine saved, and cruel-handed shame. 

If men will realize their natural duties, the tender-hearted 
pedestrian need no longer be pained by the sights of want 
and misery : 

No agonizing infant, that ne'er earned 
Its guiltless pangs 

will be seen on London streets. Thomson is the first Eng- 
lish poet who is wholly awakened to the sufferings endured 
by children of those who eat the "bitter bread of misery" and 
who shrink into the "sordid hut of cheerless poverty" 
which is "pierced by wintry winds." ^ He endeavors to stir 
the social consciousness of the wealthy. If the facts were 
faced, vice in high places would stand appalled, and the 
"heedless rambling impulse" would learn to think. The 

^ Compare Chatterton's Resignation for a description of an un- 
sanitary cottage; and Crabbe's Village, Book I, 11. 260—267. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 113 

heart of charity would be warmed if man would but pause 
to consider the struggles of his less fortunate fellows: 
"The social tear would rise, the social sigh." 

Thomson had no fear that his ethical interest would "de- 
form the splendor of his strain." A passage in Liberty 
(V, 660—666) reveals his heartfelt sympathy with helpless 
children. He notes the bounteous stores which Britain has 
provided for orphans, and bursts into a fervid lyrical strain 
over the good that will accrue to society from a wise con- 
servation of childhood. If the distresses of older people are 
relieved, it is their due ; but if the wards are children, they 
will repay the "fondest care." 

sweet 

The morning shines in mercy's dews arrayed. 

Lo ! how they rise ! these families of Heaven ! 

That! chief, (but why — ye bigots! — why so late?) 

Where blooms and warbles glad a rising age; 

What smiles of praise ! and, while their song ascends, 

The listening seraph lays his lute aside. 

Although Thomson's deep interest in children's welfare 
nmst have been stirred by recollections of hardship suffered 
by his widowed mother in the care of her children, the 
personal note is not heard in his lines. 

Akenside and Collins write in the same mood. In Win- 
ter Solstice (1740) Akenside, an ardent benevolist, contrasts 
city and country life during a snow-storm. City folk are 
dancing, singing, or are comfortable by a "splendid fire." 

Meantime, perhaps, with tender fears, 
Some village dame the curfew hears, 
While round the hearth the children play : 
At morn their father went abroad ; 
The moon is sunk, and deep the road; 
She sighs, and wonders at his stay. 

With less reticence than Akenside, Collins in Ode on Popu- 
lar Superstitions develops the episode of the shepherd who. 



114 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

bewildered in the fens, was drowned far from his flocks and 
cottage : 

For him in vain his anxious wife shall wait, 
Or wander forth to meet him on his way ; 
For him in vain at to-fall of the day, 
His babes shall linger at the unclosing gate. 

The poetry of Richard Savage is interesting in that it 
supplements Thomson's generalized appeal for universal 
benevolence by occasionally breaking through the restraint 
which literary conventions laid upon poets of the age. In 
his Wanderer he tells how children unjustly suffer many 
penalties, and are brought up obscurely in a life of want and 
shame, as a result of the indiscretions of parents. He 
trembles at the thought that there are mothers capable of 
exposing children. 

In a poem inscribed with "all due reverence to Mrs. 
Brett, once Countess of Macclesfield, and finished in the 
hours of deepest melancholy," he writes bitterly of his 
mother. ^ He charges that she pushed him out upon the 
sea of life, launching him without an oar. The concluding 
paragraphs disclose bitter invective. No mother's devotion 
shielded his infant innocence with prayer: no father's hand 
restrained him from vice or upheld him in virtue. 

Mother, miscalled, farewell — of soul severe, 
This sad reflection yet may force a tear; 
All I was wretched by, to you I owed, 
Alone from strangers every comfort flowed. 

In an age when the doctrine of universal benevolence per- 
meated poetry, and when sentimental comedy and domestic 
tragedy were popular, such passages must have made a 
strong emotional appeal. His story, according to which he 
becomes a modern instance of exposure, won a favorable 

1 The Bastard. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 115 

hearing not only from Johnson, whose "Life of Savage" 
reads Hke a romance, but also from Lady Montagu and 
Aaron Hill, who befriended him. 

In the poem Of Public Spirit (in regard to Public 
Works), Savage attacks luxury with its artificialities and 
pompous whims as they appear in landscaped gardens. 
Man's interest should not be selfish, but social. Thinking 
of his own experience, he holds that there is need in the 
nation for public institutions for the care of waifs. He em- 
phasizes the need of conserving the child. The thoughtful 
care of the state should not allow the helpless to suffer for 
errors not their own. His suggestion that the mother 
should be shielded provided the child is conserved, is the 
same in intention as the legislation that marks Napoleon 
among statesmen as a friend of children. Savage also con- 
sidered himself to have suffered injustice from the state, 
which is the ward of orphans. He reproaches unkind peers 
for having neglected his rights. 

The senate next, whose aid the helpless own, 
Forgot my infant wrongs, and mine alone. 

William Hamilton's Ode (on the neiv year, 1739) is a 
severe arraignment of luxury. No one is so hateful to him 
as the person in power who misuses orphans. He pours 
contempt on the avaricious who squander on a luxurious 
dinner what they ''Stole from the orphan and the poor." 
Could not "impious greatness" give the smallest alms from 
its "vile profusion"? "One table's vain intemperate load" 
would have provided health and bread for cottage children. ^ 
If the worldling would but listen, the oft-repeated words of 

1 Hamilton, like other benevolist poets after 1730, leaned 
heavily on Thomson. Cp. Summer for a description of a spend- 
thrift, who squandered on himself 

what might have cheered 
A drooping family of modest worth. 



116 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

gratitude expressed by cottagers would be sweeter and more 
appealing in their simple sincerity than the seducing trills of 
Farinelli. Hamilton holds that no degeneracy is greater 
than that of the man who was by nature kind, but who has 
been corrupted by idle dreams of greatness in the form of 
ribbons and coronets to the point where he "Unmoved shall 
riot at the orphan's cost." His muse will lay bare their 
treachery, and then let conscience judge "between the op- 
pressed and you." 

See, there, undried, the widow's tears; 
See, there, unsoothed, the orphans' fears. 

Robert Glynn has pictured the roll call of such agents 
of misery in The Day of Judgment. 

Here are they 
Whom fraud and skilful treachery long secured ; 
Who from the infant virgin tore her dower, 
And ate the orphan's bread : — ^who spent their stores 
In selfish luxury. 

In the spirit of Hogarth, Somerville in Bowling-Green draws 
a picture of Gripe, the lawyer, who is jovial with the fat 
client. 

But if the abandoned orphan puts his case, 

How like a cur he snarls. 
Armstrong refers in Benevolence (1751) to a whole family 
of orphans who ought to be snatched from fate. Scott's 
Palemon, or Benevolence, is a moral lecture to prosperous 
farmers in the valley of Avon. In The Melancholy Evening 
he states that to the feeling heart it is a joy to alleviate pain 
and relieve poverty, but 

Avarice grasps his useless store, 
Though Misery's plaints his aid implore, 
Though he, her ruined cottage nigh, 
Beholds her famished infants lie, 
And hears their faint, their last expiring cry ! 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 117 

After the middle of the century the reader begins to 
suspect the genuineness of the orphan who is mentioned 
with clock-Hke regularity in connection with the charity 
motive. The conventional attitude is not felt in Thomson 
because he is warmed by a fine benevolence, and has the 
additional advantage of being a pioneer; but constant repe- 
tition of what seems like a colorless reference palls on the 
modern reader until he wonders whether these poets could 
have made an impression even in their day. But the benev- 
olist poetry, which grows in force after Rousseau and the 
industrial revolution, still clings to the orphan as a favorite 
figure for pathos. 

Langhorne's Country-Justice (1774 — 1777) calls atten- 
tion to the fact that unnumbered 

objects ask thy honest care, 
Beside the orphan's tear, the widow's prayer. 
He too wishes to alleviate the distresses of poverty by re- 
straining the wealthy from wanton cruelty. He resents the 
intrusions of landscaping and architecture in rural places, 
and plainly addresses city people of wealth as "ye apes of 
modern race" and "ye reptile cits," and writes that Plutus 
may growl over his ill-got gains, while Mercury, the god 
of stealth, and Janus, the shopman with double face, perch 
upon ledgers of city merchants. In the pretentious towers 
of the nabob he sees razed villages, "And tears of orphans 
watering every tree." 

His chief concern is to overcome the injustice committed 
upon society by the failure of courts to recognize the good 
qualities of man, so that a verdict is given or sentence 
pronounced upon an evil-doer without reference to motives 
which prompted the deed. In one of the ancient halls 
which he prefers because they do not harbor a class of 
heartless rich (he refers to the capitalists who bought up 
land to compete with the landed nobility) stands a magis- 



118 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

terial chair from which true justice is dispensed by a stern 
but just judge who displays 

Honor's strong beam, and Mercy's melting shade; 
Justice, that, in the rigid paths of law, 
Would still some drop from Pity's fountain draw ; 
Bend o'er her urn with many a generous fear, 
Ere his firm seal should force an orphan's tear. 
Langhorne is in earnest. He wishes to have justice dis- 
pensed in a way that Shaftesbury would have approved. 
Henry Headley's Rosalind's Dying Complaint (to her 
sleeping child) is a poem of eleven stanzas, in which the un- 
married mother weeps over her babe whose "cruel far-off 
father" has left her to face unkind friends and cruel parents. 
Headley has frankly treated his subject in a vein of senti- 
mentalism. Unlike the vigorously human mother in the 
Elizabethan lyric on the same theme, Rosalind does not face 
her guilt, but lays her misfortunes to the injustice wrought 
by organized society. She does not long forget herself in 
the plight of her child, but blames the "ungentle hand of 
rude mischance" that has reft her heart of rest. She is 
awakened not so much to mother instincts as to a sense of 
innocence not recognized in her environment. Her mother 
will not hear her speak, and her father knits his brow. 
"Sweet Heavens! were they never young?" Her friends 
forsake her and smile when she thinks of her "true love" 
who broke his word. The sentimental shift of responsibility 
from the individual to society is clear in her exclamation, 
May God amend their cruel hearts. 
For surely they're to blame, i 

1 In Frederick (1794), Southey's sentimental standard, which 
is implied in the "Botany-Bay Eclogues" generally, leads him to 
portray Frederick as shifting the blame for his faults to society, 
even in the act of praying for forgiveness from God. 

If I have sinned against mankind, on them 
Be that past sin ; they made me what I was. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 119 

Headley is interested in this phase of the subject, and 
the child is hardly more than a text for preachment of 
sentimental doctrine of the individual abused by society. 
Rosalind wakes but to weep while she kisses her baby's 
"pretty hand," and hears in the midnight tolling a call to 
the "grass-green sward." Therefore she makes no brave 
fight for life to protect her child, but succumbs to forces at 
work against her. 

Alas! my dearest baby 

I grieve to see thee smile; 
I think upon thy rueful lot, 

And cold's my heart the while. 

'Gainst wind and tide of worldly woe, 

I cannot make my way; 
To lull thee in my bosom warm, 

I feel I must not stay. 

Jerningham's The Magdalens (1763) engages "soft- 
eyed Pity" in the cause of fallen women who have been 
rescued by Hanway's house of charity. They fell through 
no fault of theirs. 

Once destitute of counsel, aid, or food, 
Some helpless orphans in this dome reside, 
Who (like the wandering children in the wood) 
Trod the rude paths of life without a guide. 

They had been won to evil by persuasive words that moved 
their generous nature, and were hurried into situations 
which "their inborn virtue disapproved." ^ Though early 

1 Compare The Prostitute of H. K. White : 

Once wert thou happy — thou wert once innocent: 
But the seducer beguiled thee in artlessness, 
Then he abandoned thee unto thine infamy. 



120 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

stained, they now claim a second innocence which is, how- 
ever, disturbed by memories of past suffering. One of the 
unfortunates recalls how she had been abandoned to wander 
in the storm with her helpless babes, who died of hunger ; 
and she still cries out in agony of soul against her seducer. 
Jerningham appeals to man's humanity not to deride them 
now or to mock their undeserved penitential woes. 

'Tis Virtue's task to soothe affliction's smart, 
To join in sadness with the fair distrest; 
Wake to another's pain the tender heart, 
And move to clemency the generous breast. 

Jerningham's Margaret of Anjou, An Historical Inter- 
lude, illustrates how a wave of sentiment was made to en- 
gulf the audience. The advertisement says: 'This histori- 
cal interlude is upon the same plan that Rousseau com- 
posed his Pygmalion, which is a new species of dramatic 
entertainment consisting of a monologue that is often sus- 
pended by the interposition of music, which must sympa- 
thize with the passions and feelings of the personage who is 
supposed to speak." After a lost battle Margaret leads 
in her child, who falls asleep under a tree while the mother, 
"hanging fondly over him," relates his woes. When the 
child wakes, he asks for his slain father. A ruffian bent on 
pillage enters at this moment, but is moved to compassion 
by the mother's appeals for humanity, and reforms on the 
spot. 

Jerningham, whose old age carried him over into the 
new century, is characterized in Gifford's Baeviad as ''sniv- 
eling Jerningham," and is depicted as weeping at the age of 
fifty "o'er love-lorn oxen and deserted sheep." But that 
his poems served the practical purposes of reform is evi- 
dent from the statement of Hanway, who credits him with 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 



121 



having materially aided by his poetry in the establishment 
of the Magdalen House. ' 

Two poems by H. K. White are sentimental studies. A 
Ballad depicts a ''heart-sick weary wanderer," whose "faith- 
less lover" cruelly left her "faint and lone" after she had 
been disowned by her parents. 

My child moans sadly in my arms, 

The winds they will not let it sleep : 
Ah, little knows the hapless babe 

What makes its wretched mother weep! 

Now lie thee still, my infant dear, 

I cannot bear thy sobs to see; 
Harsh is thy father, little one. 

And never will he shelter thee. 

Oh, that I were but in my grave. 

And winds were piping o'er me loud, 
And thou, my poor, my orphan babe, 

Wert nestling in thy mother's shroud! 

The Lullaby of a Female Convict to her Child (The Night 
Previous to Execution) is typical, both in choice of sub- 
ject and treatment, of the desire to shield an unfortunate 

1 Jonas Hanway was a friend of children. In 1761 he ob- 
tained an act which obliged all London parishes to keep an annual 
register of parish infants; and another act by which such infants 
within the bills of mortality must be housed not in a workhouse, but, 
until they were six years of age, beyond a specified number of miles 
outside London. In i759 he published A Candid Historical Account 
of the Hospital for the Reception of Exposed and Deserted Young 
Children, and Thoughts on the Plan for a Magdalen House for Re- 
pentant Prostitutes. How closely poetry is wrapped up with hu- 
manitarian reform is clear from the relation of Jerningham to the 
project of Hanway for rescuing fallen women. (Consult Dic- 
tionary of National Biography, s. v. Jerningham, Edward.) In 
1766 Hanway published An Earnest Appeal for Mercy to the Chil- 
dren of the Poor, and in 1767 Letters on the Importance of the 
Rising Generation of the Labouring Part of Our Fellow Subjects. 



122 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

mother. White does not arouse sympathy by mere com- 
ment, but appeals to the reader's sensibiHties by reproducing 
the mother's words. UnHke those of Headley's RosaHnd, 
the mother's thoughts are wholly absorbed in her child, 
whom she addresses, and whose fate she bemoans. The 
closing stanza is characteristic of the whole poem: 

Sleep, baby mine — Tomorrow I must leave thee, 
And I would snatch an interval of rest : 

Sleep these last moments ere the laws bereave thee, 
For never more thou'lt press a mother's breast. 

The sentimental shift of responsibility is obvious in 
sentimental comedy and domestic tragedy. In Aaron Hill's 
tragedy The Fatal Extravagance (1721), the hero's mis- 
deeds are sympathetically palliated by reference to evil com- 
panionship in youth. Through his generosity, Bellmour 
had allowed himself to be lured into evil ways. His ap- 
peal to his wife is made not for himself : 

Thine and thy helpless infants' woes rise to me, 
Glare on my apprehension like pale ghosts, 
And point me into madness. 

Although the problem of the tragedy centers about the 
fate of Bellmour, the parental emotions of Louisa and Bell- 
mour lead them to speak constantly of their children. When 
she realizes that he has gambled away their fortune, she 
thinks only of her husband, and says to his uncle. 

How, then, will he support the weeping anguish, 
Of three poor children, all undone by him? 

Courtney wishes he might shield her, but Louisa is moved 
only by Bellmour's distress, and trembles at the thought of 
looking upon his face : 

His ruined family hangs on his heart, 

His helpless children's future state distracts him, 

And the once lively Bellmour smiles no more. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 123 

Bellmour is moved by the thought of his poverty-stricken 

children : 

To die at once, 
Were comfort even in agony. — But I shall be, 
Whole ages, after death, in dying — Villains, 
Dull, pitiless, insulting, dirty villains. 
Will point at some poor ragged child of mine. 
And say, "There's pride and name! . . . 
There's the blest remnant of a boasted family!" 

Writers of domestic tragedy until late in the century were 
prompt to shield the weakness of a fellow man and to see 
evil as a shade of good which man but faintly comprehends. 
Since the days of the miracle play Abraham and Isaac, 
children had been employed in tragedy to heighten effect. 
Yet writers of domestic tragedy in the eighteenth century 
show no advance over their predecessors in the treatment 
of the child element. ^ 

George Lillo's apprentice tragedy, Th£ London Mer- 
chant, or the History of George Barnwell (1731) was played 
yearly before apprentices until the days of Charles Lamb, 
who remarked upon its easy morality. Lillo has changed 
the deliberate villian of the ballad into a merchant's clerk 
who is led on by the courtesan Millwood to embezzle money 
and murder his uncle. In his crimes, Maria, the daughter 
of his employer Thorowgood, can see only the results of 
misguided innocence. The sincerely penitent Barnwell is 
executed, but has not lacked the sympathy and affection of 
his fellow clerk Trueman, Maria, and her father, who to 
the end have confidence in the goodness of his heart. 
Trueman says to Maria, "So well I know him, I'm sure 
this act of his, so contrary to his nature, must have been 
caused by some unavoidable necessity." Thorowgood de- 

^ Compare Addison's extended ridicule of weeping widows 
with orphaned children in tragedies. (Spectator, No. 44.^ 



124 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

noimces Millwood : "I know how, step by step, you've led 
him on, reluctant and unwilling. . . . But Heaven, who 
knows our frame, and graciously distinguishes between 
frailty and presumption, will make a difference, though man 
can not, who sees not the heart, but only judges by the out- 
ward action." 

The new standards, then, influenced dramatists and 
poets alike. The dramatists Hill, Lillo, Benjamin Victor, 
and Cumberland were working in the same mood as Jern- 
ingham, Headley, Southey, and White. ^ 

Langhorne strikes at the root of the problem of charity. 
He is not content to stop with superficial charity that strives 
to ameliorate conditions by gifts of food and clothing; but 
he endeavors to remove the causes of poverty and distress by 
educating country justices to note motives and environment 
as influences that must be taken into account if an intelligent 
judgment is to be pronounced. Before making his de- 
cision, a judge must determine whether the deed was prompt- 
ed by vice or nature, and must take into account "the strong 
temptation and the need." Justices must learn to know con- 
ditions which caused distress, in order to relieve it. They 
can remove the cause by themselves hearing the testimony 
of unfortunate cottagers, in place of turning them over to 
petty rascals like parish officers. 

Langhorne is especially concerned with the inhumanity 
of parish officers, who, as is known from other sources, 
played a shameful part as agents in farming out helpless 
children to industrial establishments. He looks upon the 
parish officer as a monster furnished with a human frame. 
The magistrate should ''shake the reptile soul" of such a 

1 For an analysis of other sentimental plays of the eighteenth 
century, but without special reference to childhood, see Ernest 
Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 125 

''caitiff wretch." Langhorne knows of a landowner on 
whose estates no -baiHff wields petty power. The master 
himself looks to it that the sick have medicine and the aged 
bread. Hlo illustrate his faith in human nature, Langhorne 
cites the instance of a "pitying robber" who came upon a 
new-born babe under a thorn and 

To the next cot the trembling infant bore, 
And gave a part of what he stole before. 

He was a stranger in the community ; but he had the instincts 
of a man, and ''dropped a human tear." On the other 
hand, the penniless mother of this child had received cruel 
treatment from parish officers who had driven her far 
"beyond the town's last limits." ^ Langhorne's standards 
of justice demand that the magistrate should pause "if Vir- 
tue's slightest sparks remain." He is the sole protector of 
unpitied women, and should consider well before commit- 
ting them to the "shameless lash" and the "hardening jail." 
The dictates of humanity require that he be forbearing. 

The downcast eye. the tear that flows amain. 

As if to ask her innocence again ; 

The plaintive babe, that slumbering seemed to lie 

On her soft breast, and wakes at the heaved sigh ; 

The cheek that wears the beauteous robe of shame; 

How loath they leave a gentle breast to blame. 

Langhorne's poem touched hearts long after its publi- 
cation. This is evident from his biographer's statement: 
"It would be difficult to find anywhere lines more affecting 
than those which in the first part describe the soldier's widow 
weeping over her child. The benevolent spirit which per- 
vades the whole of ithe poem cannot be too warmly praised. "- 

1 Parish officers were especially cruel in instances like this. 

- The Life of John Langhorne, by R. A. Davenport, Esq., in 
The British Poets (Chiswick), 1822, Vol. LXV. 



126 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Cowper was familiar with the sufferings of cottage chil- 
dren from having assisted Newton in charitable work. At 
his own winter evening fireside, Cowper enjoys the peaceful 
cozy recess and the calm which restore him to himself while 
the storm is raging without. On such a night the poor have 
a "friend in every feeling heart." There is irony in his 
statement that the ill-clad and sparsely-fed peasant who is 
heated by his day's labor finds time to cool in his cottage. 
Cowper's heart goes out to the children clustered about the 
ineffective fire. Close observation is reflected in the pathetic 
lines which show how they warmed their hands by the in- 
sufficient aid of a candle flame. 

The frugal housewife trembles when she lights 

Her scanty stock of brushwood, blazing clear, 

But dying soon, like all terrestrial joys. 

The few small embers left she nurses well ; 

And while her infant race, with outspread hands 

And crowded knees, sit cowering o'er the sparks, 

Retires, content to quake, so they be warmed. 

The man feels least, as more inured than she 

To winter, and the current in his veins 

More briskly moved by his severer toil ; 

Yet he too finds his own distress in theirs. 

The taper soon extinguished, which I saw 

Dangled along at the cold fingers' end 

Just when the day declined. . . . 

* 

Sleep seems their only refuge : for, alas ! 
Where penury is felt the thought is chained, 
And sweet colloquial pleasures are but few. ^ 

Where he fails to sympathize with robust children at play, 
his inmost soul is moved by the distress of children suffer- 
ing from hunger and cold. 

1 The Task, IV, 380—398. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 127 

Two of Cowper's most successful pictures of childhood 
reveal sympathetic observation of children suffering from 
cold. In Truth there is an effective portrait of a boy out at 
service to an old maid. Cowper is obviously amused by the 
"ancient prude" and her shabby gentility, but is in full 
sympathy with the incongruously dressed and freezing boy. 
Without the footnote reference to Hogarth's Morning, it is 
evident that Cowper's conception of the boy and his pious 
mistress is in the mood of Hogarth. Although given to 
thrift and parsimony, 

She yet allows herself that boy behind; 
The shivering urchin, bending as he goes. 
With slipshod heels, and dewdrop at his nose, 
His predecessor's coat advanced to wear, 
Which future pages yet are doomed to share, 
Carries her Bible tucked beneath his arm, 
And hides his hands to keep his fingers warm, i 

1 Although the lot of apprentices must have been unusually 
hard because of long hours and close supervision, poets before Blake 
have not noticed them with any show of sympathy. Blake's two 
poems on chimney-sweepers notice the lot of what Lamb called these 
"dim specks — poor blots — innocent blacknesses" who "from their 
little pulpits (the tops of chimneys), in the nipping air of a December 
morning, preach a lesson of patience to mankind." Lamb senti- 
mentalizes his observation of these poor children. As a child he 
had pursued them in imagination as they "went sounding on through 
so many dark stifling caverns, horrid shades" — to shudder with the 
idea that " now, surely, he must be lost forever." Lamb does not as 
much as allude to the cruelties to which these climbing boys were 
subjected. It is known that their masters forced them into chim- 
neys by prodding them with sharp instruments and even by building 
a fire under them. When James Montgomery of Sheffield edited 
The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend, and the Climbing Boy's Albunu 
(1824) in order to stimulate philanthropic interest in legislation 
favoring these abused children. Lamb sent in, as his contribution, 
Blake's poem from the Songs of Innocence, which carried the head- 
ing "Communicated by Mr. Charles Lamb, from a very curious little 



128 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Like Langhorne, Cowper notices dishonest parish offi- 
cers, who are partial in the distribution of charity. His 
cottagers would rather suffer the pangs of hunger than sub- 
mit to the "rugged frowns and insolent rebuffs" of knaves 
in office. He cheers them with the hope of assistance from 
his household ; a distant benefactor, who can be identified 
as Lord Carrington, will keep them from want. Their hope 
may also lie justly in their children : 

Time will give increase, 
And all your numerous progeny, well trained 
But helpless, in few years shall find their hands, 
And labor too. 

Cowper, whose humanitarianism was prompted by evan- 
gelical fervor, makes a plea like that of Langhorne. He 
considers the instance of a thief who steals by night to 
feed his family. Cowper holds that there is some excuse 
for him if pity for their sufferings warps aside his principles, 
and tempts him into sin for the support of his destitute 
family. But having gone so far, Cowper feels it necessary 
to balance the scales by a vigorous denunciation of the villian 

Who starves his own, who persecutes the blood 
He gave them in his children's veins, and hates 
And wrongs the woman he has sworn to love. 

Thomas Russell is likewise thinking in terms of religious 
belief when he chides a young man for not being moved to 
sympathy by cottage children. 

Could then the babes from yon unsheltered cot 
Implore thy passing charity in vain ? 

work." Late in the eighteenth century, Joseph Blacket, a Yorkshire 
poet, strikes a personal note in Reason's Address to the Poet, in the 
opening stanzas of which he refers to his apprenticeship to a cobbler : 
Child of mischance! by fortune's favourites spurned. 
At distance from the good, the truly great. 
In broken accents my hard lot I mourned, 
In sighs lamented my unhappy fate. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 129 

Russell follows orthodox theology by postponing the re- 
ward of the distressed cottagers to a future world. 

Too thoughtless youth! what though thy happier lot 
Insult their life of poverty and pain. 
What though their Maker doomed them, thus forlorn, 
To brook the mockery of the taunting throng, 
Beneath the oppressor's iron scourge to mourn, 
To mourn but not to murmur at his wrong. 
Yet when their last late evening shall decline. 
Their evening cheerful, though their day distressed, 
A hope perhaps more heavenly bright than thine, 
A grace by thee unsought and unpossessed, 
A faith more fixed, a rapture more divine 
Shall gild their passage to eternal rest. 

The benevolists differ from; poets like Cowper and 
Russell in that the benevolists, whose attitude is conditioned 
by Shaftesbury's' doctrine of natural goodness, did not post- 
pone redress to an unknowable future. They insisted that 
the benevolent instincts of man should be given free play 
in this life in order that all men may be partakers of the 
happiness which their maker intended they should enjoy. ^ 
Because of the natural goodness and instinctive benevolence 
which he ascribed to man, Shaftesbury had definitely 
attacked the "rod and sweetmeat" doctrine as unnecessary 
and, in fact, harmful. Scott of Amwell is conscious of a 
cleavage between himself and those who believe, for in- 
stance, in predestination. The optimistic quaker poet 
apologizes for sentiments he expresses in The Melancholy 
Evening. \The following lines from that poem clearly re- 
veal the temper of those who followed Shaftesbury. Scott 
has been writing of the plagues of helpless mankind — fear, 

^ Cowper was apparently disturbed by the views of men like 
Richardson, who was, in his estimation, not making sufficient 
allowance for faith. See An Ode (on reading Mr. Richardson's 
History of Sir Charles Grandison.) 



130 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

despair, ambition, guilt, avarice — and has shown how 
famished infants die in the sight of Avarice. If man 
must bear the reign of these plagues, he had better never 
have been created. 

Say, will Religion clear this gloom, 
And point to bliss beyond the tomb ! 
Yes, haply for her chosen train; 
The rest, they say, severe decrees ordain 
To realms of endless night and everlasting pain ! 

Where Cowper's extended and faithful transcription from 
cottage life makes a sure appeal for a consideration of the 
children of the poor, but at the same time does not go beyond 
the symptoms of poverty, the benevolists, by striking at fun- 
damental causes, go to the root of the evils of poverty, and 
wish to remedy conditions that cause poverty. Cowper has 
visualized cottage children with knees together before the 
scanty fire, but he has not recognized the odds against the 
cottager in the surrounding circumstances for which he can 
not be held responsible. ^ 

The feeling heart of Burns responded sympathetically to 
the sufferings of the poor. The Ruined Farmer ( 1777) rep- 
resents his father at Mount Oliphant. It is evident from 
Burns's autobiography that the farm had proved a ruinous 

1 Wordsworth seems to recognize a difference between the 
teaching of the Church and that of Nature. In the first book of 
The Excursion he tells how the "Scottish Church" had held (with 
a "strong hand of purity") the Wanderer and those "With whom 
from childhood he grew up." But whatever the Wanderer had im- 
bibed of "fear or darker thought," the "native vigour of his mind" 
had "melted all away" : 

Sometimes his religion seemed to me 
Self-taught, as of a dreamer in the woods ; 
Who to the model of his own pure heart 
Shaped his belief, as grace divine inspired, 
And human reason dictated with awe. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 131 

bargain: *'My father was advanced in life when he married. 
I was the eldest of seven children, and he, worn out by 
early hardship, was unfit for labor. My father's spirit was 
soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a freedom 
in his lease in two years more ; and to weather these two 
years we retrenched expenses." 

The poem is conceived as a meditation. *'The sun is 
sunk in the West." His father is sore beset with sorrow 
and grief over his poverty, which awakens thoughts of mis- 
ery while he sits by the fire and listens to the tempests that 
blow about the cottage. Not long ago he had been in a posi- 
tion to relieve distress ; but now he can with difficulty earn 
enough to support his wife and children. He looks upon 
his sleeping wife, whose cares are for a moment at rest. He 
is in despair over having brought her so low. 

There lie my sweet babies in her arms ; 
No anxious fear their little hearts alarms ; 
But for their sake my heart does ache, 
With many a bitter throe. 

He is embittered to the verge of welcoming the grave as a 
refuge from the ills of fortune. The thought of their de- 
pendence arouses his manlier self: 

But then my wife and children dear — 
O whither would they go ! 

Although he does not know which way to turn, "All friend- 
less, forsaken, and forlorn," he must endure. Although 
there can be no rest or peace, the mute appeal of his chil- 
dren stirs the father heart in him, and he takes new courage 
to face the morrow. 

In The Cotter's Saturday-Night (1785) Burns indirectly 
attacks luxury and the haughty lordling's pride by doing his 
best to paint an appealing picture of the simple life of the 
cotter. Fundamentally the poem is motivated by Burns's 
contempt for lords. City and country life are contrasted in 



132 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

the thought that the poet's friend Aiken, even though his 
worth had not become known, would have been happier in a 
cottage. In order to scale down "the lordling's pomp," he 
portrays "The native feelings strong, and guileless ways" 
of an honest toiler and his family, who represent sturdy 
democratic virtues. Although Burns succeeds in empha- 
sizing idylHc elements while he sings "The lowly train in 
life's sequester'd scene," they have not altogether crowded 
out harsher facts that throw light on the hardships and pri- 
vations of the cotter and his family. 

The chill November wind blows as the toil-worn cotter, 
his "weekly moil at end," plods across the moor. As he 
comes in sight of his cot, his younger children, 

Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through 

To meet their "dad," wi' flichterin' noise and glee. 

He is cheered by his thrifty wife's smile, and sits before the 
"wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie." 

The lisping infant, prattling on his knee. 

Does a' his weary kiaugh and care beguile. 
And makes him quite forget his labor and his toil. ^ 
Belyve, the elder bairns come drapping in, 

At service out, amang the farmers roun' ; 
Some ca' the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rin 

A cannie errand to a neibor town : 

Their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman-grown, 
In youthfu' bloom — love sparkling in her e'e — 

Comes hame ; perhaps, to shew a braw new gown, 
Or deposite her sair-won penny fee, 
To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be. 

1 Compare The Poor Man's Prayer by the Rev. Dr. Roberts of 
Eton : 

While I, contented with my homely cheer. 
Saw round my knees my prattling children play; 
And oft with pressed attention sat to hear 
The little history of their idle day. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 133 

Time passes swift-winged until a strapping lad who 
calls on Jenny is received by her parents. They are happy 
in the thought that their "bairn's respected like the lave." 
Then the cottager's simple fare is set out for supper. It 
consists of wholesome po'rridge, "chief of Scotia's food," 
and milk from their only cow which is chewing the cud 
beyond the kitchen wall. As a special treat the mother 
brings out from her storeroom a ripe cheese she had treas- 
ured for such an occasion. After this frugal supper the 
family form a wide circle before the ingle, and with serious 
mien listen to the father, who with patriarchal simplicity 
reads from the "big ha'-bible." They sing hymns com- 
pared with which "Italian trills are tame." 

Then homeward all take off their sev'ral way; 

The youngling cottagers retire to rest : 
The parent-pair their secret homage pay, 

And proffer up to Heaven the warm request, 

That He who stills the raven's clam'rous nest, 
And decks the lily fair in flow'ry pride. 

Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best. 
For them and for their little ones provide ; 
But chiefly, in their hearts with grace divine preside. 

Although the children are happy and their parents thrifty, 
the veil of sentiment does not altogether obscure the harsher 
facts of the cotter's anxiety and the not too remote con- 
tingency of hardship against which Jenny deposits her 
sorely-won penny. The emphasis is not on social or econo- 
mic conditions of the Scotch cotter, but on his sturdy hon- 
esty and God-fearing qualities. Even these. Burns fears, 
are endangered by new conditions which, "From luxury's 
contagion, weak and vile," threaten to infect the "hardy 
sons of rustic toil" who make Scotland "lov'd at home, 
rever'd abroad." 



134 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Althoug^h idyllic in his treatment, Burns is not blind, 
even in this poem, to the distressful poverty of cottagers. 
Several poems indicate that he is a son of the Revolution. 
His fiery attacks on class privilege are conceived in the 
mood of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. In Tzm Dogs 
( 1786) he mercilessly holds up the vices of the ruling classes, 
and swells the chorus of condemnation directed against 
petty officials. The unfortunate poor must endure meekly 
the abuses of a gesturing, cursing factor who threatens to 
distrain their effects. In the language of the dog Caesar, 
the gentry care as little for delvers, ditchers, **an' sic cattle," 
as he does for a soiled badger. 'In Man was made to Mourn 
(1784) Burns protests against the sacrifices of the poor 
man who labors to support ''a haughty lordling's pride." 
A manuscript variant makes the accusation specific. On 
a cold November evening the poet meets a toil-worn old man. 
In the course of protests against conditions that oppress 
this man, Burns calls attention to the overworked laborer 
who finds it necessary to beg a brother man to give him 
leave to toil, 

And see his lordly fellow-worm 

The poor petition spurn, 
Unmindful, tho' a weeping wife 

And helpless offspring mourn. 

Burns was himself oppressed by anxiety over his chil- 
dren. In a letter to Mrs. Dunlop (1793) he quotes the 
opening stanza and the chorus of "an old Scots ballad," and 
comments on his own poverty. 

O that I had ne'er been married, 

I wad never had nae care, 
Now I've gotten wife an' weans, 

An' they cry "crowdie" (food) evermair. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 135 

Ance crowdie, twice crowdie, 

Three times crowdie in a day; 
Gin ye "crowdie" any mair, 

Ye'll crowdie a' my meal away. 

"I see a train of helpless little folks — ^me and my exertions 
all their stay. . . . If I am nipt off at the command of 
fate, even in all the vigor of manhood. . . . Gracious 
God! . . . what would become of my little flock?" 

The Address to Beehebub (1786) definitely suggests the 
biting sarcasm and vitriolic attacks of Paine. Burns ironi- 
cally commends the Earl of Breadalbane's endeavors to 
frustrate the attempt of five hundred highlanders to escape 
to Canada from their lawful masters, "whose property they 
are." They were living in abject poverty and squalor, and 
wished to better their condition. Burns ironically urges the 
Earl's agents to activity, and notices the degraded state of 
children who suffer with their elders. He mockingly invites 
the Earl to visit his cottage, where Burns will dignify him 
by seating him at the ingle-side " 'Tween Herod's hip an' 
Polycrate," a seat which, the poet observes, he well deserves. 
The language of Burns is as unsparing as that of Paine, and 
as harsh as the lines of Hogarth when he pictures the squalor 
and rags of London brats in Gin Lane. If the Earl does not 
wish his people to keep their native Highland spirit, he 
should have his agents ''smash them" into chips, or let the 
bankrupts rot in the jails. As for the children : 

The young dogs, swinge them to the labor; 
Let wark an' hunger mak them sober ! 

And for the girls he advises, in the cynical mood of their 
superiors, that if they are seemly they should be sent to 
Drury Lane to be lessoned. 



136 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

An' if the wives an' dirty brats 
Come thiggin at your doors an' yetts, 
Flaffiii wi' duds, and grey wi' beas, 
Frighten away your ducks an' geese ; 
Get out a horsewhip or a jowler, 
The langest thong, the fiercest growler, 
An' gar the tattered gypsies pack 
Wi' a' their bastards on their back ! 

The gentle protest of the sentimentalists here takes on the 
fire of those who like Paine protested with colloquial vigor 
in the spirit of the Revolution. 

Among the poets before 1800, Southey had most fully 
awakened to the suffering brought upon children by war. 
Southey does not see the glamour of war. His heart suf- 
fers with the innocent victims in cottage homes. Extended 
development is found in The Soldiers Wife (1795), in 
which he catches up the war motive to give it independent 
treatment in a full-length group portrait of the widow and 
her children. She is wearily trudging along the highway 
with her children. 

Sorely thy little one drags by thee barefooted; 
Cold is the baby that hangs at thy bending back, 
Meagre and livid, and screaming for misery. 

Woe-begone mother, half anger, half agony, 

As over thy shoulder thou look'st to hush the babe. 

Bleakly the blinding snow beats in thy haggard face. ^ 

Ne'er will thy husband return from the war again ; 
Cold is thy heart, and as frozen as Charity; 
Cold are thy children. — Now God be thy comforter ! 

Southey's Victory (1798) contrasts with the nation's 
wild rejoicing over a naval victory the sadness of the home 
which has lost a sailor father who had been forced by 
lawful violence 

1 Coleridge composed the second stanza. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 137 

From his own home and wife and Httle ones, 
Who by his labor Hved ; that he was one 
Whose uncorrupted heart could keenly feel 
A husband's love, a father's anxiousness ; 
That from the wages of his toil he fed 
The distant dear ones, and would talk of them 
At midnight when he trod the silent deck 
With him he valued, — talk of them, of joys 
Which he had known, — O God ! and of the hour 
When they should meet again. . . . 

Man does not know what a cold sickness chilled the widow's 
blood when she heard tidings of the sea fight; nor does 
man know with what dread she listened to the jiames of 
those who died : 

Man does not know, or, knowing will not heed, 

With what an agony of tenderness 

She gazed upon her children, and beheld 

His image who was gone. 

Southey is not merely writing about war, but endeavors to 
realize concretely the effects of war in the cottage home. 
Instead of merely referring to the widow, he attempts to 
analyze her emotions as stirred by her children. Imagina- 
tive presentation has taken the place of incidental reference. 
The thought of children as the ''image" of their parent has 
been taken from its conventional setting in complimentary 
verse, and has been made an emotional force in an already 
tense situation. ^ 

1 Complaints of the Poor (1798) depicts a soldier's wife, seated 
by the roadside, with a baby at her back and an infant at her breast. 
The Soldier's Funeral (1795) combines the orphan, mother, and love 
of home motives. Compare also Southey's Humphrey and William 
(1794), and Wordsworth's lines on Margaret in Book I of The 
Excursion. 

Southey notices childhood in his Sonnets (1794) on the slave 
trade, and in the poem To the Genius of Africa (1795) ; and Hannah 
More has piercing lines in The Black Slave Trade. 



138 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Southey's deep humanitarian concern over the injustice 
which man has done to man through war finds classical 
expression in The Battle of Blenheim (1805). It is the 
finest flowering of the war motive in the treatment of child- 
hood. With imaginative realization he combines an ob- 
jectivity that makes the children and their grandfather real 
human beings. It was a master-stroke to take Peterkin and 
Wilhelmine at evening play near the cottage of their grand- 
father Kaspar on the battlefield of Blenheim, and to record 
their unconscious protest against warfare. At last, after a 
century of incidental notice of the widow and her orphans, 
children have emerged to protest in their innocent childlike 
manner against the makers of war. By an objective reali- 
zation of the predicament in which Kaspar finds himself 
after the naive questioning of the children, who do not 
understand the abstract "greatness" of a general like Prince 
Eugene but who insist on the fundamental "why," Southey 
has brought home his point. In true child spirit, Peterkin 
and Wilhelmine, who are unconscious of the full significance 
of their questions, solve the problem with a finality that is 
not possible in the argumentative attack. Southey was not 
toying with his subject. That his interest in the situation 
is not merely literary is clear in the light of the deep humani- 
tarian interest he displayed on the subject of war, especially 
in Victory. This poem as closest to The Battle of Blenheim 
in its insistence on the hollowness of popular acclaim in the 
face of destitute children who must pay with their suffermgs 
in the miseries of privation. 

Ill 

The problem of charity in relation to childhood became 
increasingly acute because of the growth of industrial cen- 
ters which, with the congestion of population, presented 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 139 

new problems that men had not faced even in London. The 
center of gravity in English life was shifting to the cities, 
so that there was increasing danger that poets, who felt an 
instinctive antagonism toward city life, would lose touch 
with affairs. Yet long before industry became centered in 
cities, it had been carried on in households throughout 
Britain. The development was from home industry to 
factory industry ; and long before children were employed in 
factories, they had worked on loom and wheel in the home. 
From Gay to Wordsworth, poets have noticed the spinning 
industry as it was carried on in cottages. Although chil- 
dren are not always specifically mentioned in this connection, 
numerous allusions indicate that the practice of employing 
cottage children was universal in the eighteenth century. 
The epic of English commercial supremacy in the eigh- 
teenth century is interwoven with the didactic lines of John 
Dyer's The Fleece (i757)> which gives rules for the care of 
sheep to be sure, but at the same time broadens out into a 
consideration of the foundations of English commerce. 
It is significant for this study that Dyer incidentally notices 
the problem of children in their relation to the flourishing 
spinning industry. 

He is proud of Albion's greatness, but while contemplat- 
ing her success does not ignore hardship and suffering, 
which were on the increase. In his endeavor to accentuate 
the practical value of his program. Dyer paints a rosy pic- 
ture of smiling countrysides, and glories in the prosperity 
of magnificent seaports crowded with forests of masts. 
In the course of his discussion of flourishing city commum- 
ties he calls the roll of industrial centers which are familiar 
enough now, but which were new in his day, such as 
Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, and "merchan- 
dising Hull." He has his eye on the economic trend of 



140 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

events when he records that country people are crowding 
into cities in search of "tardy-rising wealth." Dyer sees 
facts from the point of view of one who is interested in so- 
cial reconstruction.^ 

The Fleece is motivated by a desire to increase the hap- 
piness of English people through the salvation that comes 
from industrious labor. Dyer sees intemperance, the foe 
of labor, at his dastardly business of deluding ignorant work- 
ers into leaving honest industry, with consequent poverty 
and suffering. As he rises to a climax in a passage on the 
malicious workings of this eighteenth-century bolshevik, he 
notices the suffering unjustly entailed on children. As a 
matter of fact, thirty years before Crabbe, though not to 
the same extent, Dyer called attention to the problem of 
filth and squalor in cottage homes : 

cease 
The loom and shuttle in their troubled streets ; 
Their motion stopped by wild Intemperance, 
Toil's suffering foe, who lures the giddy rout 
To scorn their task-work, and to vagrant life 
Turns their rude steps ; while Misery, among 
The cries of infants, haunts their mouldering huts. 

His enthusiasm is all for the "felicities of labor." He 
would stimulate activity until the "sounding loom" mixes 
with the "melody of every vale." If the worth and content- 
ment that go with honest toil were recognized, the sun would 
shine in every cottage home. The weaver's shuttle is a 

1 In Agriculture Dodsley sees only the "ruddy maid" whose 
"dexterous hand" twirls her wheel ; and Cowper, although noticing 
the spinner's "scanty pittance," prefers to find ideal contentment 
and rural felicity in her heart, which is as light as her purse. 
Where Scott and Cowper are conservative or tend toward idyllic in- 
sistence on the happiness of the cottage spinner who "jocund chants 
her lay" while "whirling" her "circling wheel" beside the cottage 
door, Dyer does not ignore harsh realities. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 141 

''flowering shuttle," and cities are ''glad cities of the loom." 
Not content, like Scott and Cowper, to stop with idyllic 
glimpses that ignore the shade for the sunshine, and not 
moved, like the benevolists, merely to cry out against man 
for the injustice which especially in that age he has done 
to his fellow man, and not satisfied to give only his sympa- 
thy to poor cottagers, Dyer ofifers constructive suggestions 
for the betterment of conditions. He does not stop with 
charity that ignores the causes of misery, but he points the 
way to a solution that will remove those causes. 

His directions for the ambitious youth who would ac- 
quire a loom are specific. When the machine has been in- 
stalled, the industrious youth lays in a store of soft yarn. 
He smooths the threads of the warp by stringing them 
along the garden walk. Then he sits down to his work and 
guides the "thready shuttle" skilfully as it glides from hand 
to hand. Various kinds of weaving are explained. There 
is a realistic description of a "noisy fulling-mill," and an 
equally detailed picture of activities at the dyeing vats. 
Dyer is far ahead of contemporary men of letters in his 
appreciation of the poetic possibilities of machinery, the 
enthusiasm for which leads him to a belief in its efficacy as 
an agent of social uplift. ^ 

When Dyer considers the charitable aspects of organized 
industrial activities of the poor, he ofifers the workhouse 
as a remedy. He would have the nomadic poor find a 
"house of toil" in every parish, where unwilling hands 
would be taught the art of wool combing, carding, and 
spinning. His description of institutional activities is so 

1 Dr. Henage Bering, Dean of Ripon, in a topographical poem 
Reliquiae Eboracenses (before 1750) had portrayed in Latin hexa- 
meters the activities of Roman artisans who fabricated arms and 
weapons at Sheffield where "A thousand hearths at once intensely 
glow." 



142 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

optimistic that one fails to recognize the workhouses which, 
dating from "EHza's" reign, were hateful to an independent, 
liberty-loving people, however poor. Although the refer- 
ence to Queen Elizabeth would seem to indicate the tradi- 
tional workhouse, it is sometimes difficult to know whether 
he has in mind the newer type of workhouse called the 
House of Industry, which was in existence in 1757, or 
whether he is in reality thinking of the traditional institu- 
tion and writing of it in the more attractive terms of the 
House of Industry. 

Before proceeding to a glowing account of an English 
establishment, Dyer persuasively calls attention to the happy 
contentment and useful lives of the inmates of a Belgian 
workhouse. In assorting the different grades of wool that 
grow on a single fleece, the Belgians excel all nations. 
Why can not England, with a superior quality of fleece, 
excel the Belgians? The moral of the example is that 
children are able to perform the delicate task, and ought 
therefore to be employed as they are in Belgium. He sees 

e'en childhood there 
Its little fingers turning to the toil 
Delighted: nimbly, with habitual speed, 
They sever lock from lock; and long from short, 
And soft and rigid, pile in several heaps. 

When, later, he turns to a ''spacious dome" in England, he 
chooses a workhouse in the vale of Calder near Halifax. 
His vocabulary reflects his propagandist mood: "fair pur- 
pose," "gracious air," "gentle steps," "silent joy," "blithe," 
"sprightly scene," "delightful mansion." Although he in- 
sists on writing in a cheerful mood, underneath his optimism, 
which is not superficial or insincere, is felt the force of direct 
observation and first-hand acquaintance. He has seen 
children at work in these houses of charity. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 143 

The younger hands 
Ply at the easy work of winding yarn 
On swiftly circling engines, and their notes 
Warble together, as a choir of larks ; 
Such joy arises in the mind employed. 

This is probably the earliest notice of children at work on 
machinery outside the cottage home. Dyer's optimism is 
inspired by the novelty and wonder that come with the 
new direction of man's activities in group employment. 
Under the conditions which he observed in workhouses, 
children were still under the supervision of parents or at 
least of friends who lived with them in the daily routine of 
the establishment. Abuse of child labor came when chil- 
dren were taken out of the home to the factory, where fore- 
men or watchers, Who were interested only in amount of out- 
put, held them mercilessly to continuous activity during long 
hours of toil. As a result Dyer does not treat childhood as 
offering a separate problem : children are grouped, as he 
had observed them, with their elders. 

About the time The Fleece was published, children were 
beginning to be segregated in Houses of Indtistry. As the 
traditional workhouses were farmed out to the lowest bid- 
der, their management was bad. ILittle was being done to 
educate children who were inmates. Charitable individuals, 
and especially justices who faced deplorable conditions in 
the routine of office, were more and more alive to the 
evils of poverty. They also became increasingly aware of 
the inefficiency of traditional methods of poor relief, which 
did not strike at the root of the evil. As the problem was 
studied by enlightened men and women, the necessity of 
educating children to habits of neatness and industry be- 
came evident. These reformers were in fact working in the 
spirit of Dyer's Fleece, To supplement the efforts of the 
workhouse, and with the aim of ultimately doing away with 



144 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

it altogether, Houses of Industry were erected by means of 
individual contributions and assessments on the poor rates. 
Wordsworth condemned their efforts in capital letters by 
referring to these houses as "misnamed HOUSES of IN- 
DUSTRY." But in Dyer's day they represented the most 
enlightened sentiment of charitable men and women. Many 
such houses were built in the sixties. And as they were in 
existence in Lincolnshire before Dyer published The Fleece, 
he may have had in mind one of these newer ventures in 
the relief of poverty. The same enthusiasm that prompted 
his fervid lines was felt by the founders of the new estab- 
lishments. ^ 

In these efforts to ameHorate social conditions through 
the education of children to habits befitting their humble 
station, the workhouse system was extended and modern- 
ized to meet the needs of children. The arguments em- 
ployed by Dyer were used repeatedly in favor of the house 
of indust'r}^ for fifty years after the Fleece.'^ The differences 
are those of emphasis. Later writers of pamphlets, al- 
though envisaging the problem as a whole, were especially 
concerned with childhood. 

Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, which appeared thir- 
teen years after The Fleece, develops sentimentally the 
theme of the evils of luxury as reflected in unjust oppres- 
sion of the poor. Goldsmith sees the evil effects of en- 
closures of land to form new estates or to extend the old. 
As in sweet Auburn, familiar landmarks were often ruth- 
lessly razed merely to make way for a prospect.^ His at- 
tack on the misuse of wealth is veiled by the sentiment which 

1 Sarah Trimmer, Oecoiwmy of Chanty, 1787-1801 (edition 
1801), and Thomas Ruggles, History of the Poor (edition 1794). 

- Dyer and later writers may have been indebted to Locke's 
scheme of "Working Schools." 

3 Compare Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 145 

colors his reminiscent pictures of happy village life under old 
conditions. This weakens the force of the poem for social 
reform. From the time of its publication, readers have 
overlooked, in favor of the delightful reminiscence of a 
happy village life, the terrible social injustice which the 
poet recognizes as an historical fact.^ 

Although the misuse of power over helpless cottagers 
is not blinked, Goldsmith is careful to choose imagery that 
will not offend; harsh reality, where it threatens to break 
through, is prettily sentimentalized. The literary effect of 
the poem is accentuated by the fact that the reader is al- 
lowed to look upon village woes only as transmuted by the 
personality of the poet, who is kept in the foreground, and 
with whose personal woes the reader is made to sympathize. 
Goldsmith allows the reader to see only a happy childhood. 
He is sad, but the imagery drawn from childhood is pleas- 
ing. Children are at play on the green ; they pluck affec- 
tionately at the gown of the village preacher ; they laugh 
at the jokes and fear the frowns of the village schoolmaster. 
The poet's melting mood of unhappiness may sadden his 
recollection of childhood delights that can no longer be 
observed in villages which have been blotted from the 
landscape by a wealthy landowner; but the poetic sadness 
is not vigorous enough to counterbalance the idyllic mood 
in which the images of childhood are conceived. 

In his choice of theme, if not in its development. Gold- 
smith does bear witness to the increased hardship suffered 
by children of the poor.- If the poem is read in the light 

^ For a fuller account of this phase of The Deserted Village, 
see The English Village, by Julia Patton. 

2 The Poor Mans Prayer by the Rev. Dr. Roberts of Eton 
definitely connects the suffering of cottagers and their children with 
the "tyrant lord" who, "armed with cruel Law's coercive power," 
evicts them. 



146 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

of historical events which justify his sadness, the forgotten 
lines, which are not idyllic, take on a new significance. 

Another poem, which was published thirteen years after 
The Deserted Village, and which was inspired by the kind 
of literary glozing found in Goldsmith's poem, supplies the 
ugly details which Goldsmith pictured only indirectly, and 
to which Dyer referred only in passing. Crabbe's The Vil- 
lage (1783) shows the facts of village life as they had 
appeared only incidentally in poetry. Although Scott of 
Amwell used the image of children playing with toy boats 
in the kennel's dirty tide, he belongs with Goldsmith to the 
school of poets who preferred to observe the pleasant fea- 
tures of village life. In a letter to Beattie, Scott is queru- 
lous over the realism of Crabbe's The Village. "The au- 
thor of "The Village" takes the dark side of the question: 
he paints all with a sombre pencil; too justly, perhaps, but, 
to me at least, unpleasingly. We know there is no unmixed 
happiness in any state of life ; but one does not wish to be 
perpetually told so." 

Crabbe is able to amplify the brutal facts which lie at the 
roots of Dyer's problem ; but unlike the earlier poet, he is 
negative in that he suggests no specific remedy for social ills. 
The Village merely lays bare the repulsive conditions he ob- 
served in his boyhood haunts in and about the seaside 
village of Aldborough. He is impatient of pastoralities. 
When he sees the mid-day sun beating down on the bare 
heads of harvesters, he does not hide the grim realities of 
toil in "tinsel trappings." He will paint the cottage "as 
truth will paint it, and as bards will not." Poverty can 
not soothe the poor who pine for bread. Corydons still 
complain in poetry, but only of the pains which they never 
feel. In the grim actualities of contemporary life, peasants 
have had to leave their oaten reeds to follow the plough in 
a niggardly soil. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 147 

There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar, 
And to the rugged infant threaten war. 

Children and young folk do not play at rural games on the 
green. He cannot find there the simple life of nature : ''Ra- 
pine and Wrong and Fear usurped her place." Crabbe fled 
as soon as he could from his native Aldborough, where 
**guilt and famine reign." There nature was not friendly 
to man. The aged worker in the fields looks up to behold 

The bare arms broken from the withering tree, 
On which, a boy, he climbed the highest bough, 
Then his first joy, but his sad emblem now. 

Let him who dreams of rural ease and picturesque cottages, 
look within the cottages of the poor, and see children "round 
their feeble fire." They must be satisfied with a "stinted 
meal." Hardship drives many to poaching for food, and 
liquor causes brawls at inns where the father's weekly wage 
has been squandered. The drunken husband reels home to 
strike his "teeming mate." 

Crabbe's poetry was influential in rousing people to the 
need of reform: excerpts from The Village were widely 
read by impressionable children in "Elegant Extracts" and 
"Poetical Extracts," which were used in the schools. Sir 
Walter Scott and Wordsworth were profoundly moved by 
his lines. Wordsworth wrote to Crabbe's son : "They will 
last, from their combined merits as Poetry and Truth, full 
as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since 
they first made their appearance." Crabbe is not writing in 
the mood of Dyer, so that in his workhouse the cheerful hum 
of wheels has become a mournful drone to the accompani- 
ment of which there can be no voices of happy children 
singing like larks. Within its mud walls, and in the putrid 
vapors of unventilated rooms, 



148 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

There children dwell who know no parent's care; 
Parents who know no children's love, dwell there. 
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed, 
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed; 
Dejected widows with unheeded tears, 
And crippled age with more than childhood fears. ^ 

In The Introduction to the Parish Register (1807) Crab- 
be writes with greater minuteness and detail of the back- 
ground portrayed in a general way in The Village. As he 
explores the annals of his parish poor, he fails to find 
records that suggest happy Eden or sweet Auburn in the 
want that keeps sunshine from the cottage gate. In the 
same year that Wordsworth published the Intimations Ode, 
Crabbe took as his theme the vice and misery of the "infected 
Row we term our street." There the sot, cheat, and shrew 
met each evening to dispute and riot ; there one could nightly 
hear 

the curse, the cries 
Of beaten wife, perverse in her replies; 
While shrieking children hold each threat'ning hand, 
And sometimes life, and sometimes food demand : 
Boys, in their first-stol'n rags, to swear begin. 
And girls, who heed not dress, are skilled in gin. 

1 Compare the lines in The Parish Register : 

Back to their homes the prudent vestry went. 
And Richard Monday to the workhouse sent. 
There he was pinched and pitied, thumped, and fed. 
And duly took his beatings and his bread; 
Patient in all control, in all abuse, 
He found contempt and kicking have their use : 
Sad, silent, supple; bending to the blow, 
A slave of slaves, the lowest of the low; 

His were the legs that ran at all commands; 
They used on all occasions Richard's hands : 
His very soul was not his own. . . . 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 149 

Amid sweepings from the door lie mingled masses of 
putrefying matter, into which sinks "disembogue" and 
through which kennels flow. 

There hungry dogs from hungry children steal ; 
There pigs and chickens quarrel for a meal ; 
There dropsied infants wail without redress, 
And all is want and wo and wretchedness. 

Crabbe wonders if the boys with bare bodies hardened and 
bronzed by the sun will "outlive the lack of care" ; they will, 
if they can be forced to work on a farm. More degrading 
are the sleeping quarters where the beds are crowded into 
a single room : 

Daughters and sons to yon compartments creep. 
And parents here beside their children sleep. 

Sanitation is not known in such hovels. The gentle reader 
must endure, for the "true physician walks the foulest 
wards." There are frowsy patches on the floor, and there 
is downy dust beneath the window and round the posts of 
the bed on which lie tattered garments. 

See ! as we gaze, an infant lifts its head, 
Left by neglect and burrowed in that bed. 

In 1785 Cowper, in his evangelical fervor, already bore 
witness to drunken brawls that disturbed the quiet of his 
country retreat on the banks of the Ouse, and noticed in 
The Task the drunken cottager who starved his children by 
squandering his wage at the village inn. In 1794 Blake's 
Songs of Experience depicted in The Little Vagabond a 
child who appeals to his mother by protesting that the 
church is cold but that the ale-house is warm and cheerful. ^ 

1 The liquor problem in connection with incidental notice of 
childhood has been frequently noted in prose, and sometimes in 
verse. For prose, Defoe's Colonel Jacques is interesting. For 
poetry, in addition to passages already noted, there are : Edward 



150 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The eighties saw an unparalleled outburst of reform 
activities. Hannah More's Sensibility reveals clearly how 
sentimentalism was giving way to more practical consider- 
ations that are implied in Crabbe's willingness to see con- 
ditions as they exist. Sentimental poems and plays, and the 
sentimental attitude toward animals, had prepared the way 
for practical reforms in the interests of children ; but merely 
literary sentiment is no longer justified in the face of man's 
realization of social conditions that appeal to the heart for 
practical reforms. The "graceful drapery Feeling wears," 
no longer satisfies the longings of those who wish to be of 
service to ill-conditioned children. Hannah More is out of 
patience with one 

Who thinks feigned sorrows all her tears deserve, 
And weeps o'er Werther while her children starve. 

Sarah Trimmer published her O economy of Charity in 
its first form in 1787. Hannah More's Mendip Annals, 
which bears witness to her charitable work among the 
wretched cottagers of the Cheddar district, dates from the 
same period. Ruggles's History of the Poor reviews con- 
ditions from the sixties to the nineties in an effort to 
awaken the charitable instincts of Englishmen. It is not 
necessary to go to these prose sources for a portrayal of 
spiritual neglect that stimulated the efforts of Raikes and 
his followers in the Sunday School movement in the eighth 
decade, for Crabbe's fierce light had been focused on the 
abuses of the church in 1783. Village children suspend 
their games to view the funeral of their aged friend, but the 
mourners wait in vain until evening beside the grave. The 
busy priest is detained by weightier matters, and the poor 

Moore's The Oivl and the Nightingale; Mickle's Syr Martyn; Mac- 
neill's whiskey ballad Will and Jean; and the early A di<ilog Be- 
tween a Butcher and his Wife, after his return from the Ale-House. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 151 

man's bones lie unblest. Hannah More found at Cheddar 
that the cottagers were all but totally neglected by the es- 
tablished church. Among the miners and. glass workers 
of the Mendips she and her sister Patty observed children 
as wretched as those of AFdborough. 

Raikes had to meet vigorous opposition, and Hannah 
More was thwarted at every turn by obstructionist policies. 
In the welter of social unrest that accompanied the Revolu- 
tion, conservative or reactionary opinion was suspicious of 
all innovations. Men feared that the efforts of most chari- 
table organizations were somehow bound up with Revolu- 
tionary propaganda, and broadly classified them as part and 
parcel of Revolutionary activities. It was feared also that 
Hannah More's plan would raise children above their natural 
social level and make them unfit as hewers of wood and 
drawers of water. It is known, for instance, from her 
journals and other sources, that some reformers doubted 
the wisdom of teaching children even to read, because read- 
ing might make them unfit servants. ^ Wordsworth, who 
was a friend of children always, was moved in 1815 to 
protest against "systems which cramped childhood and held 
it artificially in restraint within the economic barriers set 
up as a result of class distinction." It is easy to see how 
his rugged mountain nature, bred even in school at Hawkes- 
head to freedom from close supervision, was temperamen- 
tally opposed to anything short of an equal opportunity for 
all English children. 

Wordsworth, who insisted that freedom is the birthright 
of children, could not sympathize with a system that took the 
child as soon as the mother could spare him, and placed him 

1 A rich Cheddar farmer assured Hannah More that religion 
would be the ruin of agriculture, although he conceded that religion 
might be a good thing if it would keep children from robbing or- 
chards. (Mendip Annals.) 



152 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

in a House of Industry. Rugg^les notes varying ages as 
low as three years, and repeatedly refers to children of five 
and six who assisted at the work of spinning. It must be 
remembered that Dyer's enthusiasm for the employment of 
children meant long hours from six in the morning to 
seven at night in summer, and eight in winter. A school- 
mistress was employed to supervise the youngest children, 
and a master to teach the boys for an hour during the day. 
The long hours of supervised routine must have been dead- 
ening in their influence on spontaneous child nature, and 
the aim of teaching children machine-like habits of regular- 
ity was no doubt realized. The only variety to which boys 
might look forward was seasonal work in the fields. They 
were able to drill at planting time, or to assist at harvest. 
One's heart prompts the wish that there were many pre- 
datory wild birds near houses of industry, for it does the 
heart good to know that the little boys, who were being con- 
verted into automatons, were hired out to scare birds from 
the newly-planted fields and orchards. What a relief from 
dreary routine that lasted from sunrise to sunset — and 
after! In Dyer's time, and later to the days of Lancaster 
and Bell, houses of industry were, nevertheless, the expres- 
sion of an honest effort to rescue children from conditions 
such as the poets have depicted. 

Even in the houses of industry, however, there is to be 
noted a tendency to the exploitation of child labor. The 
unfortunate element lies in the fact that the work of chil- 
dren was expected to pay expenses "with an overplus." 
This expectation would easily lead to forcing the efforts of 
children, ''as much work being required of each of them as 
they are reasonably to perform. ... In conformity to the 
plans of our society, children from five or six years of age 
are assembled under the same roof, at an early and regular 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 153 

hour of the morning, kept steadily to the purpose of busi- 
ness — taught that, even so early in life, they are able to main- 
fain themselves." Like Dyer in 1757, Ruggles is concerned 
with increasing the wealth of the kingdom. 

Sarah Trimmer, too, concerned as she is primarily with 
religious aspects of the child's welfare, falls nevertheless 
into the habit of computing the money value of work done 
by children. If only ten persons in each of the ten thou- 
sand parishes of England and Wales earned no more than 
a halfpenny a day for three hundred days in the year," the 
produce of their labor would at the year's end amount to 
62,500 pounds" ; and she notes that "the girls of the Found- 
ling Hospital under their present excellent matron, earn one 
hundred pounds a year." She would, therefore, set all idle 
children to profitable employment, adducing the example of 
thrifty Dutch children who earn their keep and more by 
making toys, "which serves as an amusement, as well as a 
profitable employment." 

She describes a charitable institution which is a modi- 
fication of the House of Industry. In the Day School of 
Industry, the promiscuous mingling of adults and children, 
which had led to overcrowding and resulting abuses, was 
eliminated. As soon as charity workers realized that in- 
dustrial life as represented in the House of Industry would 
destroy all sense of domestic life, day schools were urged for 
all except the wretchedly poor and orphans : "children com- 
monly receive more harm than good, by being mixed to- 
gether with men and women, and this is too much the case 
in Parish Workhouses." That the houses of industry were 
but one degree removed from these is evident from Ruggles, 
who observed that "the dormitory is too much crowded ; 
three or four boys in a bed, two men ; this number in one bed 
occasioned the air to be disagreeable to the smell." 



154 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Although one may be tempted to ascribe Chatterton's 
Hnes on cottage discomforts to Hterary heightening, Rug- 
gles gives evidence of the naked truth of the poet's concep- 
tion, in a report of his visit to a sick cottager in whose 
household the cramped space precluded separation of chil- 
dren from adults, and the well from the sick. ^ He lays this 
to "that miserable economy in fitting up the cottage, which 
too generally has denied the only bed room, either a fire- 
place, or a casement window to ventilate the air; the noise 
of querulous children ; the stench of confined air, rendered 
epidemic by morbid effluvia ; the vermin too frequently 
swarming on the bodies and rags of the wretched inhabi- 
tants," such causes indicate a "depth of misery which hard 
labor and industry ought not in sickness to be liable to en- 
dure." The lines in Crabbe's The Parish Register read al- 
most like a poetic version of such a passage. Crabbe sees 
as the chief cause of all this misery of children the mother's 
inability to "employ the vacant hour." In poets as in prose 
writers, remedial measures are almost invariably bound up 
with the thought of the spinning and weaving industry which 
Dyer had advocated as the salvation of the poor. The in- 
tolerable conditions from which Crabbe's children suffer are 
brought about by lack of thrift. 

Here are no wheels for either wool or flax, 
But packs of cards — made up of sundry packs. 

The aims and methods of teaching in the day school 
were the same as in the school of industry. The main in- 
terest lay in teaching manual work and regularity of habits. 
Children were taught in rotation for one hour each day to 

1 In a glass-blowing district, Hannah and Patty More entered 
a row of hovels, nineteen containing two hundred people — "both 
sexes and all ages herding together." (Mendip Annals.) 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 



155 



read the Bible and the Prayer Book. Referring to other 
studies, Sarah Trimmer held that there is no ''absolute 
necessity for children of the lower order to learn these 
things at all." She excepts the ability to read the Bible, 
"for I regard it as a part of the Birthright of the Poor as 
Britons, to read the BIBLE in their native language; and 
esteem it the duty of their supervisors to see, at least, that 
they are enabled to do it." But the main purpose was to 
teach manual occupation. An ambitious boy was able under 
this system to rise to the position of head weaver at ten 
years of age, and after fulfilling the institutional require- 
ment of teaching a successor, was entrusted with a position 
of responsibility in a manufactory, at an age when boys 
were as a rule first apprenticed. 

Such charitable efiforts in foundling hospitals, schools of 
industry, and day schools of industry may not conform to 
present-day aims and ideals in humanitarian relief ; but when 
studied in the light of factory employment of children, it 
will be realized that children in such institutions were in 
snug harbor: protected on the one hand from filthy moral 
and physical home conditions, and on the other from heart- 
less industrial exploitation. 

Ruggles reports of manufactories that "a sacrifice of 
health and morals is made ... to pecuniary advantages. 
The children are crowded in close apartments, without any 
regard to their improvement, excepting in one particular 
branch of the Manufactory, for which probably their size 
will disqualify them after a few years, when they must give 
place to smaller children, and turn into the world unacquaint- 
ed with any art, by which they may gain a future livelihood, 
and if they are females, ignorant of even the use of the 
needle, so necessary to be known by every wife and mother 



156 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

in the lower ranks of life." ^ Children did literally outgrow 
their jobs. The machines operated to advantage by them 
stood so near the floor that when the child had grown, 
he had made himself unfit for his work. 

The numerous publications which make up the nineteen 
volumes of Hannah More's collected works indicate the 
class distinction which dominated all efforts at social relief. 
She wrote a well-received book for the education of a 
princess. Her stories for common folk were carefully di- 
vided into volumes whose titles indicate their clearly-defined 
audience. The conservative tendency of all labors in the 
interests of the poor is further emphasized by her Village 
Politics, which was highly praised by Walpole. It is a 
dialogue between Jack Anvil, the blacksmith, and Tom 
Hood, the mason, and was written to counteract Revolu- 
tionary principles which were making serious headway 
among the discontented poor. Addressed by Will Chip, 
a country carpenter, to all the mechanics, journeymen, and 
laborers in Great Britain, it had tremendous vogue in its 
day, and served its purpose in counteracting the subversive 
pamphlets and tracts that had found their way into work- 
shops and coal-pits. The language was adapted to the 
class of readers it intended to reach. Her ballads, com- 
posed with the intent of answering the "foolish question" 
(which was often heard in labor circles during the Great 
War) "What have the POOR to lose?" in case of a 
French invasion, contain the likable Ploughman s Ditty. It 
is obviously propagandist in its idealization of cottage life, 
and hardly represents faithfully the class of wretchedly poor 

^ White's Clifton Grove : 

The pale mechanic leaves the laboring loom, 
The air-pent hold, the pestilential room. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 157 

peasants with whom she was concerned in her charity 
work. She uses the return at eve of the father, together 
with an ''atrocity" accompaniment: 

On Saturday-night 

'Tis still my delight, 
With my wages to run home the faster ; 

But if Frenchmen rule here, 

I may look far and near, 
But I never shall find a paymaster. 

I've a dear little wife. 

Whom I love as my life; 
To lose her I shouldn't much like. Sir; 

And 'twou'd make me run wild 

To see my sweet child 
With its head on the point of a pike, Sir. 

Among Sarah Trimmer's many examples of wretched- 
ness and suffering, it is pleasant to read of the thrifty widow 
of Hasketon, in the County of Suffolk, who, upon the death 
of her husband in 1779, was left with fourteen children, 
the eldest fourteen years old. 'Going over the head of fac- 
tors and rent collectors, she persuaded John Way, Esq., 
her landlord, to allow her to continue as cottager tenant at a 
rent of thirteen pounds a year. She refused to part with 
any of her children to a house of industry, and by the sale 
of milk, butter, and cheese from two cows, saw all her 
children either well placed in service or married to thrifty 
husbandmen. By training her eldest daughter to care for 
the younger children while she herself was selling her pro- 
duce in the nearest market town of Waybridge, two miles 
distant, she had managed her brood so well that she could 
finally leave her cottage labor at the age of fifty-five years 
to take up the less arduous employment of nursing. 



158 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Such details of a happy ending to what in most instances 
would have been a calamity, give the reader of eighteenth- 
century poetry greater confidence in the sincerity of poets 
whose lines contain what may often seem to be a colorless 
reference to widows and orphans. The widow of Hasketon 
was one of the exceptions to general suffering because she 
secured a sympathetic hearing from the master over the 
heads of his agents. In the main, readers of poetry had 
come into contact with actual scenes of suffering which 
would make their hearts responsive to the poet's lines on 
benevolence. Such conditions, as is evident from the pub- 
lications and reports of poor-relief societies, were faithfully 
portrayed by Crabbe. Conditions at Aldborough were es- 
sentially like those at Cheddar, both as regards physical 
squalor and spiritual atrophy. 

Although Thomson's sympathy with suffering cottage 
children is as lively as that of Southey and Crabbe, he differs 
from poets like Dyer and Langhorne in that he seems like 
Cowper to be satisfied with alms and public institutions 
as the proper methods of ameliorating the condition of chil- 
dren. He appeals to man's sense of justice to relieve suf- 
fering humanity from the injustice which man works on his 
fellow man. 

After the middle of the century, Dyer and Langhorne 
write in the spirit of the reforms advocated by Raikes, Mrs. 
Trimmer, and Hannah More. Where sentimentalism ended 
in an escape from the haunts of man, as in Bruce and Beat- 
tie, ^ and where it tended to throw a misty veil of sentiment 
over cruel facts, as in The Deserted Village and The Cot- 
ter's Saturday-Night, the deep sympathy of Dyer and Lang- 
horne led to specific programs of reform that had as their 

1 Compare Lavina and Edwin. 



CHILDREN OF THE POOR 159 

object the removal of the causes of poverty. Dyer had ad- 
vocated teaching the child habits of thrift and patient appli- 
cation as shields against intemperance and shiftlessness that 
bring suffering in their train. Langhorne was also working 
for the removal of the primary causes of misfortune when 
he appealed for an intelligent administration of the law. 

By way of the Sunday School, Raikes struck at the root 
of the problem ; and Hannah More, who left London salons 
and bluestockings for the children of miners and glaziers 
at Cheddar, held to fundamentals in her efforts to give 
them the benefits of the only vocational guidance known to 
the eighteenth century. 

When applied to children in relation to their environ- 
ment, Crabbe's accusation that poets ignored actual condi- 
tions in favor of pastoralities, is not altogether accurate, 
unless the industrial abuses of child labor, which Crabbe 
himself did not notice, are included. Through their op- 
timistic philosophy, sentimental poets were attracted by 
those elements in rural life which contrasted with the ob- 
vious vice and artificialities of city life. The charming pic- 
tures of cottage contentment and rural felicity to be found 
in poetry that notices childhood, must not obscure the fact 
that the benevolists were awake to actual conditions of suf- 
fering and poverty even in rural communities. The most 
idyllic of the cottage motives, the return at eve of the father 
after a day of labor, is most often pitched in a minor key. 
Even in The Cotter s Saturday-Night, where all is well 
with the children of the household. Burns has saddening 
premonitions of a change coming over the simple cottage 
life of his beloved Scotia. 'In the face of protests from 
Thomson to Burns, it cannot with justice be said that con- 
ditions under which children lived were not noticed by 
poets. Dyer's enthusiasm for his program of industrious 



160 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

habits as the remedy for the ills of poverty, led him to 
advocate child labor in the spinning industry as carried 
on in public institutions. Children employed in organized 
industry had to wait until Grahame's Birds of Scotland and 
Wordsworth's The Excursion for poets who championed 
their cause, many years before Mrs. Browning wrote The 
Cry of the Children. 



CHAPTER IV 
EDUCATION 

But thanks to those, whose fond parental care 

To Learning's paths my youthful steps confined, 

I need not shun a state which lets me share 

Each calm delight that soothes the studious mind. 
Thomas Cole, Ode to Contentment. 

As reflected in poetry, the history of education in the 
eighteenth century begins and ends with the conflict between 
the traditional methods of classical education and the utili- 
tarian training advocated by John Locke and his disciples. 
A persistent attack on ''cell-bred" discipline is revealed in 
poetry from Pope's Dimciad to Cowper's Tirocinium. After 
1762, Rousseau's entTiusiasm added impetus to the already 
widely disseminated doctrines of Locke. Poetic discussion 
of the moral aspects of education for children was influenced 
by the evangelical fervor of Whitefield and the Wesleys. 

The combined influences of Locke, Rousseau, the senti- 
mentalists, and those inspired by religious fervor, operated 
to break down the traditional curriculum and the methods 
by which it was administered. Poets are agreed with Locke 
and Rousseau in their stated preference for domestic edu- 
cation. They reflect also the widening interest in natural 
science, which went hand in hand with utilitarian propa- 
ganda. The violent attacks on established methods are 
essentially democratic in tendency in that they imply modi- 
fications to meet the needs of the masses in a closer approach 
to utilitarian standards. The desire to substitute for the tra- 
ditional memoriter exercises a real knowledge derived from 



162 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

direct observation of natural phenomena, ranges poets 
on the side of those who insisted that the child should be 
taught by observation of objects in nature. Although their 
attacks produced few tangible results in the established 
schools, in that they did not make themselves felt in the 
classical curriculum at all, popularization and simplification 
of text-books on arithmetic, geography, grammar, and na- 
tural history reflect a growing desire to meet popular needs. 
That the eighteenth century was mainly a period of transi- 
tion and preparation is clear from a study of poetry from 
Pope to Cowper. 

The instinctive objection to disciplinary education voiced 
by the early romanticist poets was occasionally rein- 
forced by satirical thrusts of poets who belong to the 
classicist tradition. Sir J. H. Moore's Written in a College 
Library gives a satirical picture of the somnolent state of 
higher education. The poet has often seen an "ancient 
fellow" who, ''free from the cares of children, noise, and 
wife," enjoyed smooth moments which are not tokens of a 
vigorous activity in educational affairs. ^ Although John 
Gilbert Cooper had been a pupil of Dr. Nicholls at West- 
minster, and evidently a close student of the classics at 
Cambridge, he preferred "contentment's humble lot" to 
the artificialities of court and school. His Epistles (to his 
friends in toivn, from Aristippns, in retirement, 1/38) are 
unfavorable to schools. He prefers the guidance of his 
heart to the head work of pedants. His point of view is 
indicated by such phrases as "bookish rules," "hard with a 
comment's iron chain," "figures and bloated tropes," "three- 
legged syllogisms," "the bubble blowing race," and "grave 
pedantic train." 

1 Compare the Autobiography of Gibbon, passim, for conditions 
at Oxford. 



EDUCATION 163 

Among the early romanticists, impatience of restraint is 
voiced in the extreme language of Chatterton, who looks 
upon the pedant as the "licensed butcher of the human 
mind," and who in Happiness (1770) makes the sweeping 
accusation, 

O Education, ever in the wrong, 

To thee the curses of mankind belong. 

Mickle glories in the uncontrolled impulses unknown to 
the victims of ''schooltaught prudence and its maxims cold." 
As he treads "Cintra's summits" and views the scene where 
the Saracen was conquered, he prefers the vague glow with 
which the locality, "of name unknown," suffuses his soul. 
He feels in chivalry the dynamic power of the ideal. In 
Knozi'ledge (1761) he scales down intellect in favor of 
emotion by scorning "lettered pride" and the boastful claims 
of "star-crowned science." Sages stray and grope in end- 
less night: they can never be certain of their conclusions. 
He decides to pay "silent adoration" and to be "in wonder 
lost." Mason holds that education will serve but to "chill 
affection's native fires." Knowledge beyond what is neces- 
sary to save the individual from vice, will only multiply 
his cares. School routine was also uncongenial because it 
interfered with the free romantic development of individu- 
ality. Bruce's school girl, Lavina, was solitary in her habits. 
Beattie is unfavorable to formal instruction when he does 
not wish to mope over the schoolman's "peevish page," and 
exclaims, 

Perish the lore that deadens young desire. 

Instances might be multiplied, but it is clear that romantic 
tendencies were in a vague way opposed to organized edu- 
cation. Poets preferred not to endure the restraint of 
school life ; confinement was irksome to the spirit which 
vaguely prompted their love of freedom. 



164 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Yet there is in Thomson's Liberty (Part III) a striking 
passage which indicates that it is better for the schoolboy 
not to be troubled by gleams of the ideal. Thomson argues 
that if man rose to a glimpse of ideal beauty, he would 
shrink up like a flower before the mid-day sun. The ce- 
lestial regions to which Liberty retired after the decadence 
of Roman liberty are too bright to be viewed by man. The 
light is too keen for mortals ; therefore, says Thomson, 
sacred be the veil that clouds the light. It is curious that 
Thomson, precursor as he is in so many ways of romantic 
tendencies, should have applied this thought to childhood. 

A sense of higher life would only damp 
The schoolboy's task, and spoil his playful hours. 
Nor could the child of Reason, feeble man, 
With vigour through his infant being drudge, 
Did brighter worlds, their unimagined bliss 
Disclosing, dazzle and dissolve his mind. 

The romanticists were ever trying to break through the 
literal fact to the spiritual meaning which it veiled. Words- 
worth gloried in the fact that as a schoolboy at Hawkeshead 
he was "disturbed" by gleams of divine truth. It is evident, 
however, that as far as childhood is in his mind, Thomson 
was not ready to advocate romantic emotions that would set 
the child apart from his fellows because of a faculty of 
spiritual vision that made him "an eye among the blind." 

There was little danger that the curriculum of eighteenth- 
century schools would develop mystic insight into a realm of 
romantic spirituality. The curriculum, in so far as it was 
noticed by poets, was condemned as lacking in the spirit 
that gives vitality to education. The general accusation 
was that schools emphasized the letter to the exclusion of 
the spirit. In the Dunciad, Pope conceives the goddess of 
Dullness as sending "Stupefaction mild" to every pupil. 



EDUCATION 165 

Education made no attempt to impart real knowledge ; but 
instead, 

Beneath her footstool science groans in chains. (IV) 

When Pope arraigns pedagogical methods in the fourth 
book of the Dunciad, he has in mind endowed schools, such 
as Winchester, Eton, and Westminster, which he specifically 
mentions. Schools of this type were on foundations that 
date back as far as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 
By the eighteenth century they were open only to sons of 
the nobility and the wealthy class. The curriculum was 
essentially the same as that intended for boys at the time of 
the Reformation. The course was based on Latin and 
Greek. Its ideals were disciplinary : the teaching had lost 
touch with life. During the seventeenth century, with the 
advent of natural science and the inductive philosophy of 
Bacon, there had been protests against exclusive attention to 
classical learning. Milton's letter to Hartlib had empha- 
sized the need of correlating the curriculum with the 
practical demands of life. Locke's Thoughts (1693), al- 
though cautious in not condemning Latin and Greek out- 
right, outlined a practical regimen for sons who were 
to be leaders in public life. ^ The objective was practical 
usefulness. 

Pope catches the spirit of these writers in his ridicule of 
the conventional instruction given in endowed schools. The 
pedagogue argues before the throne of Dullness, that since 
man is distinguished from brutes by words, words are 
man's province. Therefore 'Words we teach alone." The 
narrower way is always preferred in his system. Placed to 
guide youth at the door of learning, he never suffers it to 

1 Locke would have Greek studied by professional scholars 
only. 



166 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

"stand too wide." As soon as a boy shows signs of mental 
awakening by asking questions, 

We ply the memory, we load the brain, 

Bind rebel wit, and double chain on chain. 

Confine the thought, to exercise the breath, 

And keep them in the pale of Words till death. 

Whate'er the talents, or howe'er designed, 

We hang one jingling padlock on the mind. (IV) 

The footnote informs the reader that these lines are "A re- 
capitulation of the whole course of modern education . . . 
which confines Youth to the study of Words only in 
Schools." When a pupil shows an inclination toward in- 
vestigation in natural science, the pedagogue turns the 
child's interest to trifles — makes of him a virtuoso. The 
"P. W." footnote states that Dullness is careful to charge 
the "Investigators of Nature to amuse themselves in trifles, 
and rest in second causes, with a total disregard of the first." 
The result of this slavery to words is a ''trifling head and a 
contracted heart." 

When there was danger of innovation in high places in 
the educational world, a sable shoal of "broad hats, and 
hoods, and caps" circled about Dullness and, as friends of 
Aristotle, championed traditional learning. As a matter of 
fact, the heads of the University of Oxford met in 1703 to 
censure Locke's Essay of Human Understanding, and to 
forbid its being read. The tremendous yawn of Dullness, 
which infects all the court, is explained to mean the schools, 
where, "though the boys are unwilling to sleep, the Masters 
are not." Yet in the face of such protests from Pope, the 
schoolboy was destined to continue "of painful pedantry 
the poring child." 

Gilbert West's Education (1751) is an imitation of the 
form and diction of Spenser's Faerie Queene, and reflects the 
opinions of Locke on education. In fact, Locke in the guise 



EDUCATION 167 I 

of a palmer conducts the children of the Fairy Knight 
through the kingdom of Custom to ''Paedia's house." Their 
adventures in the domain of the fierce giant Custom, and 
their arrival in the valley where Paedia lies asleep, consti- 
tute the narrative with which West has bound up his attack 
on the classical curriculum. Alluding to Locke's preoccu- 
pation in Thoughts with the earliest stages of childhood, 
West praises the eminent philosopher for holding up his 
"faithful light" before the uncertain feet of children. 

Ne with the glorious gifts elate and vain 
Lock'd he his wisdom up in churlish pride; 
But, stooping from his height, would even deign 
The feeble steps of infancy to guide. 

During their wanderings in search of Education, the 
pilgrims come to a roaring flood stained by "infant gore." 
Beside it stands a "birchen grove" that with "its bitter 
juice empoisoned all the flood." After fording this cruel 
stream into which children were being lashed ("By nurses, 
guardians, fathers, dragged along"), they come to a land- 
scaped garden which is the seat of Learning. Nine virgins 
who sit there in "mimic majesty" preside over "every learned 
school." They affect antiquities even in their dress, are 
blind to the charms of modern knowledge, and scorn the 
language of their country. They mourn over the "rubbish 
of Rome and Athens," gathering up each little scrap, "how- 
ever foul or torn." They are so enamoured of antiquity that 

Ne sacred Truth herself would they embrace, 
Unwarranted, unknown in their forefathers' days. 

They are vassals of the giant Custom, who endeavors to 
take in the knight's son. In place of the usual compliance 
the knight attacks the giant. Hard pressed, Custom sum- 
mons his followers, who are fainthearted and timorous- 
minded at best. He had trained them from infancy to "hug 



168 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

his chain" ; he had craftily persuaded them to revere both 
the good and the noxious, the rational and the vain, as 'in- 
stitutions sage and venerable." Therefore they were seized 
with terror at sight of the knight and his children, 

Attended by that palmer sage and bold, 
Whose venturous search of devious truth whilere 
Spread through the realms of Learning horrour drear, 
Y-seized were at first with terrours great; 
And in their boding hearts began to fear, 
Dissentions factious, controversial hate, 
And innovations strange in Custom's peaceful state. 

The knight and his train are hissed as they ride on in their 
survey of the domains of Custom, where the knight could 
observe nothing sound or wholesome. Although he saw that 
Custom's vassals declined the "wine-stained board Of 
beastly Comus," they had nevertheless resigned their hearts 
to idle joys. 

As the knight would not have his son breathe even this 
"sweet contagion," he turned aside from the beaten paths 
to a majestic mountain on the side of which is a thickly- 
shaded grove. There the light was mellow, as though the 
sun's rays had passed "Through windows dim with holy 
arts pourtrayed." They came upon a venerable matron, 
asleep, whom the knight addresses as "fair island queen" 
and "mother of heroes," and who is none other than Paedia. 
Upon hearing the knight, she awakes from her melancholy 
trance and appeals to the nobles of Britain to realize their 
responsibility as leaders of the people. At this point West 
almost wholly abandons his archaic vocabulary in the ardor 
of his appeal to the nobles to join in overcoming the abuses 
of the giant Custom. He sees a time when wisdom and 
virtue will again come to the land, once the yoke of "cell- 
bred discipline" has been thrown off. Paedia will then re- 



EDUCATION 169 

ascend her throne, surrounded by "vivid" laurels and ''frag- 
rant" flowers; while ''von supercilious pedant train" must 
be by her 

Y-taiight a lesson in their schools unknown, 
'To Learning's richest treasures to prefer 
The knowledge of the world, and man's great business there.' 

The utilitarian nature of West's thesis reflects the poet's 
knowledge of Locke's Thoughts, which is concerned with 
preparing a young nobleman for a responsible position in 
the state. The prophecies of Paedia are clearly in the name 
of utilitarian education. But West, however strong and di- 
rect his stand against the humanities, does not mean to be 
radical to the extent of complete substitution of a modern 
course. Although the knight is revolutionary in that he 
succeeds in carrying his son through the domain of Custom 
into the valley of progressive realities, Paedia reveals not so 
much radicalism as a conservative liberalism that would 
retain whatever squares with virtue and vital knowledge in 
the ancients. This is to be 

Joined with whatever else of modern date 
Maturer judgment, search more accurate, 
Discovered have of Naiture, Man, and God. 

Pope and West have much the same objective; both 
poets are keenly aware of the need of reform that shall modi- 
fy contemporary overemphasis on word study. Where West's 
Paedia pleads for a course that shall combine modem sub- 
jects with those of ancient days, Pope's Dullness, who is 
disturbed by unmistakable signs of a desire for innovation, 
sighs for a pedant king like James I, who will rule a court 
with Latin ("stick the doctor's chair into the throne"), a 
king who will "Give law to Words, and war with Words 
alone" (Dmvciad, IV). 



170 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

John Lang^orne also turns from the study of words to 
the observation of nature. His Inscription on the Door of a 
Study tells the student who would enter there to come with 
an open mind. He must forget his pedantic lore, 

And all that superstition, fraught 

With folly's lore, thy youth has taught — 

* 

Leave it. and learn to think again. 

As he turns over volumes of the "mighty dead" he must re- 
member that authors are human beings and that first ''from 
Nature's works we drew our knowledge." Langhorne ad- 
vises the man of inquiring spirit to enter "yonder grove" if 
he wishes to find true knowledge. This advice is in harmony 
with the questionings and injunctions of Defoe's Complete 
English Gentleman. Defoe had asked, "But is it worth any 
gentleman's while, as Oldham says, to go seven years to the 
Grammar Bridewell (the school) and there beat Greek and 
Latin?" Defoe's answer is, "The knowledge of things, not 
words, makes a scholar." Langhorne writes in The En- 
largement of the Mind (1763) of the 

dull inmate of pedantic walls. 
On whose old walk the sun-beam seldom falls, 
Who knows of Nature, and of man no more 
Than fills some page of antiquated lore — 

Something of men these sapient drones may know, 
Of men that lived two thousand years ago. 

Such men despise the "better knowledge of the world" and 
scorn the man who looks about him on nature. Langhorne 
seems to have had a vision as early as 1763 of a course of 
study that would embrace natural history, including the 
study of man. In place of the "sages boasting o'er the 
wrecks of time" he would make nature the preceptress of 



EDUCATION 1 71 

children. In this respect he is in advance of Locke, who 
had urged mainly that the child should not be loaded with 
memory work but be made to think and reason for himself. 
Langhorne leans toward doctrines like those of Rousseau, 
who condemned language study for children except in the 
mother tongue, and who wished to substitute knowledge 
based on direct observation. Langhorne would have chil- 
dren and men look about them ; he wishes them to open their 
eyes and understand the visible world. Nature is to him 
a "sacred guide." 

See on each page her beauteous volume bear 
The golden characters of good and fair. 
All human knowledge (blush collegiate pride!) 
Flows from her works, to none that reads denied. 

Attacks on the humanities were strengthened by the 
aid of those who, like Joseph Priestley, would substitute 
scientific curiosity for traditional interest in the classics. 
Priestley is convinced that at Warrington Academy the in- 
struction is *'too scholastic, consisting of those studies which 
were originally thought requisite to form the divine, and the 
philosopher only, and had no direct view to civil and active 
life ; and yet the greater part of our pupils were not intended 
for any of the learned professions." He expresses the point 
of view held by men of the century, like Bentham, Black- 
stone, and Adam Smith, whose influence on educational 
theory was wholly in the direction of useful knowledge. ^ 

1 The scientific researches of Priestley and others were noticed 
by poets. John Scott is overwhelmed by the immensity of the new 
stores of nature which science has opened up. They are vast 
"beyond what e'en a Priestley can explore." Mason's Ode to Mr. 
Pinchbeck notices the "pint of Priestley's air." Lovell calls for 
Priestley's wand. He would Hke to "tame the storm . . . with 
calm expectant joy" like FrankHn, who could "in viewless channels 
shape the lightning's course." Mason gives "sagest Verulam" 



172 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The lack of adequate text-books hampered the study of 
science among children. A boy at school had practically to 
remain a virtuoso for lack of teachers or books to guide 
him in his observations of plant life. ^ This is illustrated in 
the experience of Sir Joseph Banks, who was a companion 
of Captain Cook on the voyage of the ''Endeavor" to Aus- 
tralia. When, as a pupil at Eton, he was returning alone 
from bathing, he observed the beauty of flowers by the 
hedgerow in the lane. Although determined to study 
botany, he could find no one to teach him except the old 
wives of the neighborhood. During a holiday he came 
upon Gerard's "Herball," and carried it back in triumph to 
Eton. Such an experience makes it easy to see why 
Pope was moved to ridicule the attempts of teachers to 
sidetrack the interest of boys in natural history. 

credit for banishing "childish vanity" from the groves of learning. 
Bacon is looked upon as the prophet of unborn science. Wilkie 
likewise notices him as the dispeller of "Gothic night" and as the 
"dawning light" : 

When ignorance possessed the schools 
And reigned by Aristotle's rules, 

A man was taught to shut his eyes, 

And grow abstracted — to be wise. 
Mickle reflects the new enthusiasm for naitural science in Knozvledge. 
He joys to trace with Boyle how matter takes ten thousand forms 
in metal, plants, and worms. And Soame Jenyns, after flying with 
Newton "O'er all the rolling orbs on high," traces the mazes of 
nature with "labouring Boyle," and with him admiringly observes 
"matter's surprising subtilty." 

^ John Scott had often searched the pages of Linnaeus, 
"The Scamian sage, whose wondrous toil, 
Had classed the vegetable race." 
On the poet's botanizing excursions, Linnaeus must have been his 
chief reliance. 



EDUCATION 



173 



After the middle of the century, text-books showed a 
tendency to meet the interest of children in the world about 
them. In view of the dominating position Newton holds in 
the estimation of poets, it is not surprising to find as early as 
1754 A Plain and Familiar Introduction to the Nezvtonian 
Philosophy.^ Newberry included in his "Circle of Sciences" 
an attractive book on Newtonian philosophy (1761) ; Tom 
Telescope, a young student, explains the laws of mechanics 
with the aid of familiar objects. Many publications show 
a tendency to simplify and popularize general science. Mrs. 
Trimmer in 1780 wrote An Easy Introduction to the Knowl- 
edge of Nature, in which she gives Isaac Watts credit for 
stimulating her to write for children in such a way as to 
interest them in birds, animals, fish, insects, and flowers. 
John Aikin's Calendar of Nature (fourth edition, 1785) is 
dedicated to Mrs. Barbauld and reflects the nature lessons 
of Rousseau's Emile. William Mavor's Natural History 
(1800) is the best volume on the subject for use in schools. 
Priscilla Wakefield's Introduction to Botany (1796) illus- 
trates the tendency to write books on separate' phases of the 
general subject." In the last quarter of the century, Cowper 
is abreast of his age. He conceives it to be one of the chief 
delights of a parent to give his child vital knowledge based 
on direct observation : 

1 Newton is mentioned, and ahnost deified, in scores of pas- 
sages from Thomson to Wordsworth. 

2 For references, especially to books not available on this side 
of the Atlantic, I am indebted to a very interesting study : L'educa- 
tion en Angleterre entre 1750— 1800 Apergu sur I'influence peda- 
gogique de J. J. Rousseau en Angleterre. These .... pour le Doctorat 
de I'Universite Presentee a la Faculte des Lettres de Paris par 
Jacques Pons. Paris, 1919- 



174 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

To show him in an insect, or a flower, 
Such microscopic proof of skill and power, 
As, hid from ages passed, God now displays. ^ 

In order to make the subject matter of these studies com- 
prehensible to young minds, it was essential to study the 
mother tongue. Both Pope and West had deplored the 
lack of attention to the vernacular. Their attacks were 
specifically supported by Thomas Sheridan's prose treatise 
on British Education; or The Source of the Disorders of 
Great Britain (1756). The title page informs the reader 
that the prevailing evils are the ^'natural and necessary con- 
sequences of the present defective System of Education," by 
which Sheridan means the classical curriculum. He re- 
peats the same arguments already noted in the Dunciad and 
West's Education. His constructive plan follows the cue 
of West's observation that the muses who presided over the 
springs of learning despised their native language. Sheri- 
dan attempts to show that " a revival of the art of speaking, 
and the study of our own language might contribute, in a 
great measure, to the cure of these evils." He turns the 
conventional arguments employed in favor of the classics, to 
show the practical value of an intelligent and systematic 
study of the mother tongue. He argues that everyone will 
acknowledge the need of effective public speakers in Parli- 
ament and on the forum, and that, as is clear from the essays 
of Addison and others, clergymen are in need of proper 
training in the mother tongue if they are to read the service 
in such a way that the Establishment may retain a vital hold 
on the masses. Pope's lines on the dismissal of students, 
after a purely theoretical schooling, had incisively summar- 
ized the evil : 

Then, blessing all, "Go, Children' of my care! 

To Practice now from Theory repair." (Dunciad, IV) 

1 Tirocinium (636-38). 



EDUCATION 175 

Byrom likewise realized the evils resulting from inat- 
tention to correctness and power in the use of English. 
This is evident from his strictures in Advice to the Rev. 

Messrs. H and H » to Preach Slozv, which 

emphasizes the need of training. 

What is a sermon, good or bad, 
If a man reads it like a lad ? 
To hear some people, when they preach, 
How they run o'er all parts of speech. 
And neither raise a word, nor sink. 
Our learned bishops, one would think, 
Had taken schoolboys from the rod. 
To make ambassadors of God. 

Poets and prose writers are alike alive to the shortcom- 
ings of the prevailing system, which does not prepare boys 
for the duties of life. ^ 

Sheridan sees a way out of the difficulty. He admits 
that English has lacked stability ; but Doctor Johnson's Dic- 
tionary may now serve as a standard. True stability, he 
continues, can result only from thorough teaching of Eng- 
lish in the schools. He is convinced that ''nothing can be 
a greater national concern than the care of our language," 
and concludes that the schools should labor to secure in 
their scholars a facility, clearness, and elegance by daily 
exercise in their own language. And as the art of speaking 
can be acquired only with difficulty, it must be taught in 
the schools by "study, precept, and example." These con- 
tentions are in harmony with Pope's doctrine in the Dunciad. 
It seemed odd to Pope that the young graduate could on 
the grand tour forget his classical acquirements, in Italy of 

1 Compare Swift's Letter to a Young Clergyman. 



176 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

all countries. If he found no practical use for them on 
classic ground, they could be of little value to him at home. ^ 

Walpole's comment on the great applause accorded the 
Eton boy's English address of welcome to the King and 
Queen in 1762, indicates the drift toward a recognition of 
the mother tongue. "It was English, which is right. Why 
should we talk Latin to our kings rather than Russ or Iro- 
quois?" Prior had felt the need of apology for the English 
Prologue (1695) spoken by the Westminster schoolboy, 
Lord Buckhurst, at a performance of Dryden's Cleomenes. 
The boy hesitated to welcome friends of the school ''in poor 
English." On the other hand, half a century later, Byrom's 
Verses for the Manchester Free Grammar School in 1748, 
on the occasion of the breaking up of the school, shows that 
six boys spoke in English and only one in Latin. 

The attack on the classics was humorously carried for- 
ward by Cawthorn in Wit and Learning, an Allegory ^ : 

Each schoolboy sees, with half an eye, 
The quarrels of the Pagan sky. 

Before he was six years old, the boy played a thousand 
waggish tricks ; he drilled a hole in Vulcan's kettles, broke a 
prong from Neptune's trident, and stole the favorite sea- 
knot of Amphitrite. The waggery of this child is presented 
with a gusto that betrays the poet's sympathies. 

Cawthorn's allegorical poem The Birth and Education of 
Genius traces the progressive stages of a child's education. 
After Genius had learned to read at the dame's school, his 
father Phoebus experienced difficulty in finding a suitable 
tutor : there were too many dullards "among the doctors of 
Parnassus," 

1 Dropped the dull lumber of the Latin store, 
Spoiled his own language, and acquired no more. 

2 Spoken at the Anniversary, 1757 (at Tunbridge School). 



EDUCATION 177 

Who scarce had skill enough to teach 
Old Lilly's elements of speech. 

Finally, however, Phoebus came upon Criticism, who spoke 
"pure Latin, and your Attic Greek" : he was in fact the ad- 
miration of his college. He could detect the slightest liter- 
ary flaw ; old authors were his bosom friends. Versed in 
all the trifles of antiquity, he wrote learnedly, like Bentley, on 
the origin of whistles. Apollo was glad of all his lore ; yet, 
careful of his son, he more than suspected 

That all this load of erudition 

Might overlay his parts at once, 

And turn him out a lettered dunce. 

The question of classical studies is brought forward in 
Robert Lloyd's Epistle to J. B. Esq. (1757). Lloyd, who 
had been an usher at Westminster, desired a natural educa- 
tion for youth. ;A ''truant from the pedant's school," he 
would rid himself of antiquated rules. The artificiality and 
stiff formality of classical teaching were uncongenial to 
him. ^ He scorns pedants 

Who waste their time, and fancies vex 
With asper, lenis, circumflex, 
And talk of mark and punctuation, 
As 'twere a matter of salvation. 

In Genius, Envy, and Time, a fable Addressed to JVilliain 
Hogarth, Esq., he confesses himself to have been a worship- 
per of truth from his earliest years, and as a result scorns 

1 Had Shakespeare crept by modern rules, 
We'd lost his witches, fairies, fools : 
Instead of all that wild creation, 
He'd formed a regular plantation, 
A garden trim, and all enclosed, 
In nicest symmetry disposed. 



178 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

the ''.gloss of knowing fools" who follow mechanical pre- 
cepts. This attitude is revealed also in a scornful couplet 
in A Dialogue : 

Or give the Roman proper word 

To things the Romans never heard. 

The foregoing criticisms were focused on the curriculum 
in schools that were feeders to the great universities. The 
course of study was intended for boys who were ambitious, 
like the son of Thomas Warton's Gloucestershire divine, to 
wear a gown or to enter one of the professions. In the 
Progress of Discontent (1746), Warton has the son brought 
to the university, his chief reliance being ''Horace by heart, 
and Homer in Greek." In the same way when Graeme was 
stimulated by the thought of preferment through the chan- 
nels of education, he traveled the only safe road, that of the 
classics. His Student reveals the thoroughness and patience 
with which he had applied himself to the established routine : 

Fired with the prospect, I embraced the hint, 
A grammar borrowed, and to work I went; 
The scope and tenor of each rule I kept, 
No accent missed me, and no gender 'scaped ; 
I read whate'er commenting Dutchmen wrote, 
Turned o'er Stobaeus, and could Suidas quote ; 
In lettered Gellius traced the bearded sage. 
Through all the windings of a wise adage. 

In view of contemporary customs it was reasonable that 
such conscientious efforts should have raised high hopes 
that "some modern Laelius" would single him out for ad- 
vancement. 

As Winchester, Eton, and Westminster were closest to 
the universities, their curriculum, method, and text-^books 
were as a rule adopted by outlying grammar schools. This 
resulted in a uniformity of preparation that facilitated the 



EDUCATION 179 

matriculation of students at Oxford and Cambridge. To 
accomplish this purpose, only the traditional subjects were 
taught; the original intention of the founders was pretty 
strictly adhered to. Grammar schools throughout England 
had been founded like the school at Hargrave, near Chester, 
"for the government, education, and instruction of youth in 
Grammar and Virtue." ^ From the Cathedral School of 
Gloucester it was reported that *'the classical education 
pursued here is from the rudiments of Latin and Greek to 
the extent of Sophocles, Euripides, etc., and the best of 
Latin authors." Kingston in Hereford frankly reported 
that the "general classical routine necessary for qualification 
of youth for the Universities is carefully pursued." At 
Ashford in Kent "the master is not required to teach them 
writing or arithmetic or any other branch of literature, ex- 
cept the Classics." The report from Wotton in Glouces- 
tershire indicates how local conditions were modified ac- 
cording to the preferences of the master : "The Westmin- 
ster Latin and Greek Grammars are used, and its plan of 
education is at present pursued, the Master having formerly 
been a scholar upon that Royal Foundation." Smaller 
schools that did not always carry the boy through the upper 
school, easily adapted themselves to the individual student; 
at least it would seem so from the report of High Wycombe 
(Bucks.), where the Eton Latin and Greek grammars were 
used "unless a boy is intended for Westminster or any 
other Public School, where other grammars are preferred." 
Sometimes, however, the Regulations definitely prescribed 
the routine, as at Wilton (Chester), where we find : "5th The 
Eton Grammar, and no other, shall be taught." Occasion- 

iThis and the following quotations are taken from that in- 
valuable compilation A Concise Description of the Endowed Gram- 
mar Schools in England and Wales by Nicholas Carlisle, two vol- 
umes, London, 1818. 



180 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

ally the master has written the Latin and Greek grammars. 
This is the case at Reading (Bucks.), where the Rev. Dr. 
Valpy was head master. In his school the system of educa- 
tion was nevertheless founded upon those of Westminster, 
Eton, and Winchester ''with such alterations as expedience 
and locality render necessary." 

A comparison of the authors a boy was required to read 
reveals no fixed number or sequence. ^ The extensive drill 
in Latin syntax and prosody required two lessons in the 
morning and two in the afternoon, together with evening 
exercises. English verses were supplied for translation in- 
to Latin. It could not have been the rule in all schools to 
supply the matter of these verses, for there is something 
pathetic in the traditional request of the lower-form boys, 
*Tlease give me some sense." At Appleby Parva, after 
Greek had been taken up, the course was arranged so as to 
give "Latin prose in the morning, and Latin poetry in the 
afternoon." Clara Reeve reports (1799) that in a certain 
school two evenings a week were given to reading English 
classics so that the boys might know something of their na- 
tive language while they were learning the dead ones. 
But she adds, '* a trouble that few schoolmasters take upon 
them." 2 

After he had read Cicero and Homer, the boy wrote 
Latin verses without having the matter supplied. No doubt 
Cowper was thinking of prizes offered for excellence in 
Latin verse when he wrote in Table Talk that at West- 
minster 

little poets strive 
To set a distich upon six and five. 

1 Compare in addition to Carlisle, op. cit., the Autobiography 
of Samuel Johnson. 

2 Destination: or Memoirs of a Private Family by Clara Reeve 
(in three volumes, London, 1799), vol, I, p. 77. 



EDUCATION 181 

As a boy he had been a poet at Westminster, and had been 
made "proud with silver pence." In a letter to Unwin he 
tells how in a day-dream he fancied himself again at school 
to receive the reward of a silver groat that was sent from 
class to class for the admiration of fellow students. At 
Eton the master granted a weekly half holiday if some boy 
had composed Latin verses worthy of being inscribed in gilt. 
This boy was sent up to the master to ask for the holiday. 

Saturday exercises included for the older boys the trans- 
lation of the Catechism and the Thirty-nine Articles, "with 
Welchman's notes," into Latin. After the long list of Latin 
and Greek books and compilations the boy was expected to 
master, it sounds like grim irony to be told that such a 
course "generally proves as much as a Boy's stay at School 
admits of." It is of such extended formal drill in parsing 
and conjugation that Locke says, with an eye to the prac- 
tical, "A great part of the learning now in fashion in the 
schools of Europe, and that goes ordinarily into the round 
of education, a gentleman may in good measure be un- 
furnished with, without any disparagement to his affairs." 
It is one of the complaints of Cowper in Tirocinium 
that boys are kept at these schools too long, with the result 
that the younger boys are corrupted by imitating the vices 
of the boys of sixteen and eighteen. 

Schools, unless discipline were doubly strong. 

Detain their adolescent charge too long; 

The management of tyros of eighteen 

Is difficult, their punishment obscene (218 — 221). 

As a matter of fact, children were admitted to these founda- 
tions as soon as they could read the New Testament in 
English, usually at the age of six. They might remain, 
ordinarily, as in the instance of Congleton (Chester), "as 
long as Parents please." Usually the statutes give "no 



182 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

specific time of superannuation," although at Hereford 
scholars might not remain after sixteen, and at Tiverton 
(Devon) not after eighteen, while at Eton, boys are not ac- 
ceptable before eight or after eighteen. Even at Eton, 
then, the course might drag out to ten years. It is small 
wonder, in view of the lack of touch in the curriculum with 
vital affairs of life, that West should think of boys as 
wasting fruitless hours while ''hid in studious shades" ; and 
the round from grammar to Latin verses and back again 
naturally led him to say that "irksome and long the pas- 
sage was." Richardson's opinion that ''a great deal of pre- 
cious time is wasted to little purpose in the attaining of 
Latin," simply shows that the novelist was at one with the 
poet and philosopher in their attack on the classical curricu- 
lum. 

Churchill's trenchant lines in The Author convey the 
bitterness of his recollections of childhood days spent in 
the acquisition of dead languages. He was destined by 
"cruel parents" for the church "ere it was known that I 
should learn to read." He was made to bear the "slavish 
drudgery of the schools." He misspent the precious hours 
of his youth in climbing the steep and rugged ascent of 
learning, only to find at the top that it were better to forget 
the little he had learned at the barren spot called a school. 
Jago's Labour and Genius (1768) contains vigorous satire 
on the blindness of pedagogues. Jago's caustic lines con- 
demn the leveling of all natural talent in the merciless rou- 
tine of grammatical instruction. The boy of genuine parts 
has no opportunity of showing his superiority to the dull 
plodder who goes through prose and song "insensible of 
all their graces," and is learned in words alone. Happy 
recollections of his friendship with Shenstone at Solihul do 
not enhance, even with the lapse of years, the "painful toil" 



EDUCATION 183 

and the "dull, tiresome road" through 'Triscian's crabbed 
rules." 

For the gloomy conception of the teaching profession 
outlined in The Author s Apology, Lloyd might have taken 
as his theme the statement in the Vicar of Wakefield: "I 
have been an usher at a boarding school myself, and, may 
I die by an anodyne necklace, but I had rather be an un- 
der-turnkey in Newgate." The poem gives the impres- 
sions of a poet who had been an usher at Westminster. 
With the bitterness of his friend Churchill he writes that 
if he wished to avenge himself on his enemy, he could in- 
flict no greater injury than to make him a "tool of learning" 
in the form of an usher. Lloyd can not endure the thought 
of "working on a barren soil" and laboring incessantly to 
"cultivate a blockhead's brains." 

Oh ! 'Tis a service irksome more 
Than tugging at the slavish oar. 

Yet such his task, a dismal truth, 
Who watches o'er the bent of youth. 

While earning a paltry stipend, the teacher sees his pupils 
prosper by use of their talents ; but as for his own progress 
in learning, 

No joys, alas ! his toil beguile, 
His own lies fallow all the while. 

The evidence of poets and prose writers points clearly to 
free use of liquor by masters and ushers. The Provost of 
Eton in 1781 is described as one of the fat and gouty di- 
vines whose fondness for port and cheerful company is 
greater than his love of education. Cole, the antiquary, 
used to have routs in his college apartments at Eton, the 
college court being filled with carriages and tumults "not 
much to the edification of a place of education." Jenyns 
makes "vicar" rhyme with "liquor," and every reader of 



184 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

eighteenth-century fiction knows what the novelists thought 
of drinking parsons. In Clarissa Harlozifc, Lord M. writes 
to Lovelace that if he finds one of his tenants sober on the 
occasion of Lovelace's marriage, 'Tritchard shall eject him." 
A study of Gillray, Rowlandson, and Hogarth will con- 
vince the most skeptical that Cowper was justified in his 
statement that the ''government is too much interested in 
the consumption of malt liquor." When Defoe spoke of 
England as a "drunken nation from lord to tenant," he 
probably thought also of schoolmasters. Goldsmith was 
willing that schoolmasters should puzzle their brains over 
grammar while he drank good stout liquor that gave his 
genius "better discerning" ; but schoolmasters also indulged 
in the privilege of stimulants. The potation penny con- 
tributed by children at term end was probably put to the 
use for which it was intended. Johnson's formula was 
"claret for boys, port for men, and brandy for heroes." 
Colonel Jacques begged some beer to drink with his bread, 
and reports that the "good woman gave me very freely." 
Locke held in Thoughts that the child's ''Drink should be 
only Small Beer." ^ 

Although Cowper mercilessly flays the evils of public 
school education, he is not primarily concerned with the 
curriculum. Far from objecting to the classics, he is fa- 
vorably disposed toward them. While not going to the 
length of Shaftesbury, who fervently hoped that the time 
would not be long ere he might change the unprofitable 
study of "these moderns of ours" for a hearty application to 
the ancients, or like Denham who swallowed his Greek 
with the same eagerness as he did water when thirsty, 
Cowper nevertheless recalls with pleasure how he cultivated 

1 Locke's Some Thoughts Conceniing Education, Section i6, 
Drink. 



EDUCATION 185 

a school taste for ancient poetry, ''catching its ardor as I 
mused along." Neither does he join hands with those who 
plead for a study of the mother tongue. Although an- 
nouncing himself as ''no friend of Lily's Grammar," he con- 
siders it one of his principal advantages as a composer of 
verses that he has not read an English poet "these thirteen 
years, and but one these twenty years." His classroom 
experiences must have been pleasant, for he reveals a fond- 
ness for school terminology, weaving into his lines in Con- 
versation such phrases as "prompts him" and "prescribes his 
theme." His genuine scorn is aroused by the "chattering 
train" of Fashion, who is aped in the schools. Cowper warms 
up to his theme while considering the spendthrift boy whose 
school expense "pinches parents blue" and "mortifies the 
liberal hand of love." He is keen on the trail of moral 
offenses, which he finds "where most offensive, in the skirts 
Of the robed pedagogue." ^ 

Cowper's Tirocinium (1785) condemns schools chiefly 
on the ground that the separation of the boy from parental 
ties destroys not only his confidence in his father but also 
his ability to join naturally thereafter in the life of the 
home circle. This painful rupture is the beginning of all 
evils, and occurs at an early age when the boy is left to 
the mercies of a crowded school that can not properly 
guard his morals or guide him in the right path. While 
the parent is absorbed in the careful breeding of colts and 
puppies, his son is scampering at one of "these menageries" 
which "all fail their trust." Thinking of his own experience 
at school, Cowper concludes that "great schools suit best 
the sturdy and the rough." One large class of boys who are 
torn from home and who are "at best but pretty buds un- 
blown" miss the affection of father and mother, and are 

1 The Task, Book II. 



186 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

given *'by public hackneys in the schooling trade" no better 
nourishment for the growing mind than ''conjugated verbs, 
and nouns declined." Sound religion such as the child had 
learned at home at his mother's knees is sparingly taught 
while he is crammed with "much mythologic stuff." At 
this point the poet escapes to a footnote to guard against 
misunderstanding. He does "not mean to censure the 
pains that are taken to instruct a schoolboy in the religion 
of the heathen, but merely that neglect of Christian culture 
which leaves him shamefully ignorant of his own." This 
is in harmony with Cowper's specific theme. 

That we are bound to cast the minds of youth 
Betimes into the mould of heavenly truth. 
That taught of God they may indeed be wise, 
Nor ignorantly wandering miss the skies (105 — 108). 

Guided by this thought, Cowper views with pleasure the 
home training of the infant and child. He is carried back to 
the "season of life's happy spring" by the thought of that 
ingenious dreamer in whose "well-told" story "sweet fiction 
and sweet truth prevail." Bunyan's name is not mentioned, 
however, "lest so despised a name should move a sneer." 
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress would naturally be a favorite 
with Cowper because it "guides the Progress of the soul 
to God." Until sent to the public school, the child was not 
ashamed to read such books or to begin and close the day 
with prayer. If the parent wishes to train his boy to lose 
these habits, which are a "bond upon his heart," he should 
allow him to learn "loose expense and fashionable waste" 
with a mob of boys at a public school where he will remain 
childish in "mischief only and in noise" because taverns and 
the bad example of older boys will there teach the knowledge 
which school pedantry does not. The glory of former ages 
when schools bred poets, statesmen, and divines has fled : 



EDUCATION 



187 



Our striplings shine indeed, but with such rays 
As set the midnight riot in a blaze. 

The evil is heightened by the careless father who regales his 
sons with stories of his schoolboy adventures, in place of 
emphasizing the pleasing spectacle of those experiences 
which would make him live over again his "innocent sweet 
simple years" through recollection of 'The little ones, un- 
buttoned, glowing hot" in their games at school, where he 
"started into life's long race." 

Children whose expectation of riches or titles makes solid 
worth an encumbrance may indeed learn at school a certain 
pleasing address or personal carriage, and the scorn of all 
delights but those of sense. ,But the plebeian, whose chief 
distinction should be a spotless name, must shine because of 
"true desert or not at all." What are parents thinking of, 
then, if they "risk their hopes, their dearest treasure, there?" 
It is immoral to risk all in order that the child may make 
a titled friend by intercourse with young peers at a great 
public school. It is "barbarous prostitution of your son" 
to proceed on the assumption that "The parson knows 
enough who knows a Duke." The poet scorns such boyish 
friendship, which can make "A piece of mere church-furni- 
ture at best." The "public hives of puerile resort" that are 
of most approved standing, owe their repute in part at least 
to such sordid considerations. The hope of connections 
formed for interest swells the great schools beyond a size 
that can be well managed. And yet Cowper does not wish 
to indicate that small schools are therefore to be preferred. 
He will praise a school as Pope has praised a government: 
that one is best which is most faithfully administered. 

Few boys are born with talents that excel, 

But all are capable of living well ; 

Then ask not, whether limited or large? 

But, watch they strictly, or neglect their charge? 



188 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

If masters are anxious only that the boy may con his lessons 
while they neglect his morals as a ''despised concern," the 
great schools and small deserve a common blame. 

To the father who is blessed with an ingenuous son, 
Cowper offers as substitute for a master, that the parent be 

Father, and friend, and tutor, all in one. 

Why resign into a stranger's hand the task which he is him- 
self capable of performing? 

How ! — turn again to tales long since forgot, 

Aesop, and Phaedrus, and the rest? — Why not? 

He will not blush, that has a father's heart, 

To take in childish plays a childish part. 

But bends his sturdy back to any toy 

That youth takes pleasure in, to please his boy. (545 — 550) 

What can compensate the father for such pleasures to be 
enjoyed in ''domestic snug recess?" Certainly not a son 
whose heart has been alienated by absence and by accomp- 
lishments or vices learned at school. 

If the father's professional demands absorb all his time 
and energy, he may find it expedient to engage a reliable 
tutor, who can be his son's best friend in domestic sur- 
roundings. A capable tutor, provided his talents are re- 
spected in the household, will increase a parent's delight in 
his son because discipline will be backed by the love which 
the son would miss at school. His mind will be developed, 
but at the same time the parent may joy to see "his morals 
undefiled." 

Cowper is so sensitive to sensual abuses that he offers 
still another alternative. If the parent is a worldly man 
whose table is "indeed unclean" with "discourse obscene," 
and if he has a "polite, card-playing" wife who is chained 
to routs, so that every day the child sees in the home what is 
fatal to his future, 



EDUCATION 189 

Find him a better in a distant spot, 

Within some pious pastor's humble cot, 

Where vile example (yours I chiefly mean, 

The most seducing, and the oftenest seen) 

May never more be stamped upon his breast, 

Nor yet perhaps incurably impressed. (759 — 764) 

There he will grow strong in body and soul under a kindly 
and natural regimen of regular hours and simple diet. In- 
stead of idle dreaming of past and future follies, 

His virtuous toil may terminate at last 
In settled habit and decided taste. 

By presenting these ways out of the dilemma, Cowper 
decides the debate over the comparative value of school and 
home education. 

Cowper's lines are addressed to the prosperous middle 
class of EngHshmen (''tenants of life's middle state") 
whose undebauched character retains two thirds of all 
English virtue. He calls upon them to look about on an 
age ''perversely blind" in the matter of education, and to 
decide wisely in the education of their sons. The school- 
bred boy may be virtuous still, but if so he is the excep- 
tion, because in the eyes of the poet, prevailing manners of 
loose taste and extravagance take their color from the 
schools. Therefore, 

though I would not advertise them yet, 
Nor write on each — "This building to be let," 
Unless the world were all prepared to embrace 
A plan well worthy to supply their place ; 
Yet, backward as they are, and long have been, 
To cultivate and keep the MORALS clean 
(Forgive the crime), I wish them, I confess, 
Or better managed, or encouraged less. (915 — 922) 

Poetic attacks like those of Pope, West, and Cowper 
put schoolmasters on the defensive. This is clear from a 



190 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

prose treatise like Barrow's Essay on Education (1802), 
which contains a chapter on the comparative advantages of 
school and home education. Although novelists and essay- 
ists of the century confirm the evidence of poets on the edu- 
cation of children, masters of schools tried to meet ob- 
jections raised on the grounds of improper supervision and 
poor instruction due to large numbers. Barrow suggests 
that the evils of domestic education can be tolerated only in 
favor of those who are incapacitated physically or mentally. 
It is obvious, however, that he is holding a brief in relation 
to which he is not a disinterested party. The evidence of 
poets against endowed schools is supported down through 
the century. 



Poems based on material drawn from village schools 
were written in a different literary tradition. The tendency 
toward sentimental and idyllic treatment is strong in all 
poets who noticed the elementary or village schools. Such 
humorous treatments of the earliest stages of education as 
those of Prior and Tickell, which are less common than the 
idyllic treatment as exemplified by Shenstone's Schoolmis- 
tress (1742) and Goldsmith's The Deserted Village (1770), 
are prompted by good nature, and not by the biting satire 
that inspired the lines of Churchill and Lloyd on the en- 
dowed schools. Distance lent enchantment to the poet's 
representation of the first stages of his education. Even 
where the problem of poverty in relation to schooling has 
been noticed, as in Dyer's The Fleece, we may note the 
same tendency to overlook harsher facts. That the problem 
of providing common education for the masses was acute 
is instanced by the fact that Brougham's Committee in 18 18 
reported three thousand five hundred parishes, in a total 



EDUCATION 191 

of ten thousand, without schools of any kind. Practical ef- 
forts to establish primary education had been made from 
the last decade of the seventeenth century by the Society 
for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. In the eighties 
of the eighteenth century the Sunday School movement, 
headed by Raikes, had faced the problem ; and the efforts of 
Hannah More to establish schools at Cheddar, have already 
been noticed. The fact, however, is that the elementary 
school did not receive either the amount or the kind of prac- 
tical treatment accorded to the endowed schools. 

Although poets were on the whole fully abreast of the 
most advanced contemporary educational ideals with 
regard to endowed schools and the houses of industry, they 
were inclined to become conventional or sentimental the 
moment they took up the first period of a child's education. 
Mention of the hornbook, for instance, is common from 
Prior to Wordsworth. Although the hornbook must have 
been displaced in part at least by the spelling-book before 
the reign of George II, references and allusions persist to 
the end of the century. ^ Cowper was five years old at the 
close of the reign, yet he notes as late as 1785 that parents 
put a hornbook into the child's hand. They do this to 
please the child at a tender age: 

Tis called a book, though but a single page. - 
Added to the unique form and shape is the quaint poetic 
flavor of the criss-crow row that is associated with the horn- 
book." 

1 In Cowpers Conversation, alphabets of ivory hold the atten- 
tion of the unlettered boy, who is 

Sorting and puzzling with a deal of glee, 
Those seeds of science called his ABC. 

2 Tirocinium. 

'•'' Compare the poem The Characters of the Christ-Cross Rozv, 
attributed to Thomas Gray, Aldine edition. 



192 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Coming down to the eighteenth century from medieval 
days, the hornbook has rightfully been called the well- 
spring of English education and literature : 

All human arts and every science meet 
Within the limits of thy single sheet. 

Few specimens have survived the destruction which has be- 
fallen children's books A penny hornbook at a sale in 
London in 1893 brought the sum of sixty-five pounds. 

In Prior's Alma, the English maid gives Master John 
a gingerbread hornbook. 

And, that the child may learii the better, 

As he can name, he eats the letter. 

Proceeding thus with vas-t delight, 

He spells, and gnaws, from left to right. (Canto //) 

Tickell gives a humorous account in his Horn-Book : 

Thee will I sing, in comely wainscot bound, 
And golden verge enclosing thee around ; 
The faithful horn befor:?. from age to age, 
Preserving thy invaluable page ; 
Behind, thy patron saint in armour shines, 
With sword and lance, to guard thy sacred lines : 
Beneath his courser's feet the dragon lies 
Transfixed; his blood thy scarlet cover dyes; 
Th' instructive handle's at the bottom fixed. 
Lest wrangling critics should pervert the text. 
* 

No greasy thumbs thy spotless leaf can soil, 
Nor crooked dogs-ears thy smooth corners spoil. 

Scarce lives the man to whom thou'rt quite unknown, 
Though few th' extent of thy vast empire own. ^ 

1 Cawthorn's JVit and Learning (1757) : 

Here, puppy ! with this penny get 
A hornbook or an alphabet ; 
And see if that licentious eye 
Can tell a great A from an I ? 



EDUCATION 193 

Poets often refer satirically to the ignorance or illiteracy 
of the masses, without, however, inquiring into probable 
causes or remedies. By using the hornbook as his point 
of departure, Tickell is exceptional in bringing his discussion 
of illiteracy close to the affairs of children. In mock heroic 
vein he gives a picture of the fond grandsire who was con- 
soled and comforted on his deathbed by hearing his grand- 
son Hodge pronounce gravely the great A, B, C of the 
hornbook. The poet also notices the general state of in- 
ability to read. Fame reports that there are whole parishes, 
especially in Essex Hundreds, in which the hornbook is 
unknown. It has since been estimated that, in a total of 
five and one half million inhabitants in 1700, only thirty 
thousand children were receiving schooling, whereas ac- 
cording to our standards there should have been nine hun- 
dred thousand. ^ 

Although poets are content to refer to the hornbook, 
we know that awakened interest ' 1 the study of the mother 
tongue resulted in the publication of spelling-books and 
grammars. In Mandeville's Essay on Chanty Schools we 
find in addition to references to the criss-cross row (Christ- 
Cross Row), allusions to heaps of spelling-books and 
primers; and publishers' announcements contain such titles 
as The Child's First Book. In Defoe's Complete English 
Gentleman we find speculations on the advantage of spelling 
the ''beautifullest and best improved language in the world." 
As early as 1699 the board of the Society for the Promotion 
of Christian Knowledge gave a hearing to Mr. Symons, a 
schoolmaster of Cripplegate, who had announced the dis- 
covery of the secret of teaching twenty to thirty boys the 
alphabet in a day's time. 

^ Consult D. Salmon's The Education of the Poor in the Eigh- 
teenth Century. 



194 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

In actual business practice we find that during the first 
quarter of the century masters were frequently bound to 
teach apprentices to write. Stipulations to this effect are 
frequent in Sheffield about 1715. The Manuscript Inden- 
tures at Corsham contain a memorandum concerning Peter 
Bush, who was bound on May 20, 1706: ''it was agreed 
before sealing hereof by all parties therein concerned that 
the said William Goodwyn shall teach his said apprentice to 
write 'Well before he is forth of his time." ^ 

In spite of the wide interest in grammar, children could 
not have benefited much, because poor spelling was common 
among all classes in town and country. Although Wilkie 
takes offense at his ''degenerate age of lead" for its belief 
that Shakespeare could not read, his biographer says that 
"deeply learned as he was, Wilkie could neither read nor 
spell correctly." Chatterton in Kew Gardens observes that 
it is doubtful if Bristol aldermen can read ; while Lloyd 
states that not one in twenty will succeed, for "Consider, 
sir, how few can read." It is to be expected that Cowper's 
"rural carvers" would try to immortalize themselves in 
"characters uncouth and spelt amiss" ; but we are hardly 
prepared for the evidence of illiteracy among men and 
women of station in life. In Clarissa Harlowe there is 
this appeal : "Dear, dear sir ! if I am to be compelled ! let it 
be in favor of a man that can read and write." And later, 
in connection with a wretchedly spelled letter from Solmes, 
Clarissa says : "he can read and write as well as most gentle- 
men, I can tell you that" ; while in Pamela there is comment 
on the nobility to the effect that Lord Davers's nephew 
"spells most lamentably." The same situation appears with 
even greater emphasis with regard to women. In Clarrisa 
Harloive there is the comment: "So, the honest girl is ac- 

1 See O. J. Dunlop's English Apprenticeship and Child Labor. 



EDUCATION 195 

cepted — of good parentage — but, through a neglected educa- 
tion, plaguy ilHterate : she can neither write, nor read wtit- 
ing." Defoe's observations on female education are that 
girls are taught to read, "and perhaps to write their names 
or so, and that is the height of a woman's education." Gay 
passes off a bad speller with the comment "like a court lady 
though he write and spell." 

The education of girls was of course in general not as 
careful as that of Swift's Stella. In the elementary schools, 
girls were taught chiefly to sew and knit, so as to fit them for 
service, this being the attitude even in the time of Hannah 
More's Cheddar Schools at the close of the century. It is 
therefore not merely witty of Chesterfield to admonish his 
son that "Inaccuracies in orthography, or in style, are never 
pardoned but in ladies." Walpole recalls how the younger 
Duchess of Marlborough "exposed herself by placing a 
monument and silly epitaph, of her own composition and 
bad spelling, to Congreve, in Westminster Abbey." It 
would seem from all evidence that the primitive and cer- 
tainly inadequate hornbook could not have been an effective 
medium for teaching more than the alphabet, and that the 
shoals of mothers' assistants did not perform their mission 
adequately. 

The same impulse that stirred poets to recall lovingly 
their early acquaintance with the hornbook, led them also 
to remember with affection the village schoolmistress. 
Rural surroundings and her own simple ways fitted in easily 
with an idyllic conception of early childhood as a happy, 
carefree time. Sympathetic pictures of the dame's school 
occur as late as Henry Kirke White's Childhood, which 
notices how the "village matron kept her little school" ; and 
Crabbe is stirred to write lines that breathe sympathy and 
love in The Parish Register (1807) : 



196 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The pious mistress of the school sustains 

Her parents' part, nor their affection feigns, 

But pitying feels; with due respect and joy, 

I trace the matron at her loved employ. (Part /) 

The poet of realism might here have written with char- 
acteristic bareness of detail, for later governmental in- 
vestigation and debates in Parliament are not colored by 
sentiment. We hear of gray-haired dames whose chief 
recommendation is their poverty. A member quoted a 
dame as saying: ''It's little they pays, and it's little we 
teaches them." Macaulay, while speaking in the Commons 
in 1847, refers to teachers of both sexes in elementary 
schools as the ''refuse of the callings," and contends that they 
do "not know whether the earth is a cube or a sphere." Yet 
whatever their shortcomings, village schools were the sub- 
ject of sentimental treatment from Shenstone to Crabbe. 

The schoolmistress fared better than the schoolmaster. 
Burns, who was quick to sense sham and pretension in the 
dignitaries of his acquaintance, has left a not too pleasing 
record of schoolmasters. As a result of Burns's satire in 
Death and Dr. Hornbook (1785), John Wilson, parish 
schoolmaster at Tarbolton, was compelled to relinquish his 
teaching. The bad conditions from whi(^h elementary edu- 
cation suffered, become clear from a perusal of this "true 
story." Wilson at the same time conducted the parish 
school and a small grocery shop, where in addition to com- 
modities he sold drugs and gave medical advice. In the 
words of Burns : "This gentleman, Dr. Hornbook, is pro- 
fessionally a brother of the sovereign order of the ferula ; 
but, by intuition and inspiration, is at once an apothecary, 
surgeon, and physician." 

Much of the characteristic wit of Burns went into the 
composition of the not wholly complimentary Epitaph for 



EDUCATION 197 

Mr. William Michie, schoolmaster of Cleish Parish, Fife- 
shire '. 

Here lie Willie Michie's bones ; 

O Satan, when ye tak him, 
Gie him the schulin o' your weans, 
For clever deils he'll mak them! 

Byrom's Epitaph (zmitten in chalk on the grave-stone of a 
profligate schoolmaster) also credits its subject with more 
skill than ability. 

Here lies John Hill, 
A man of skill, 

His age was five times ten : 
He ne'er did good. 
Nor ever wou'd. 

Had he lived as long again. 

It is not necessary for the purpose of this study to ex- 
amine details that constitute the differences between the 
earlier and later versions of Shenstone's Schoolmistress. 
In the mood of Tickell, when that poet deigned to notice the 
humble hornbook, and in the spirit of Gay's Trivia, Shen- 
stone in 1737 published The Schoolmistress in a volume of 
Poems for friends. Although The Schoolmistress was in- 
tended to produce a humorous effect, the reading public took 
it seriously, as in the instance of Gay's Shepherd's Week, 
and enjoyed its imagery. As it is generally known, Shen- 
stone's poem was published in the revised form of 1742. 
Although the dame is the central figure, Shenstone is writ- 
ing from the point of view of the children. 

The sentiment with which he strove to suffuse his lines 
does not lead him to ignore wholly the shortcomings of the 
village school. In a pensive mood he observed the unworld- 
liness and simplicity of schoolmistress and scholars ; but 
his train of sentiments is based on direct observation. He 
"fairly drew his picture from the spot." In the spirit of his 
age he feared that this attention to lowly life would be ''im- 



198 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

pitted to an entire ignorance." But it was this "fondness 
for his native country" and the fact that he did not ''counter- 
feit the scene" which drew the praise of Wordsworth, who 
would back the schoolmistress in her garden or in her chair 
before the cottage door. Shenstone, in fact, has sketched 
sufficient details to make possible a reconstruction of many 
of the features of a rural elementary school. If the ad- 
vertisement calls attention to the sentimental strain of the 
poem, ("a peculiar tenderness of sentiment") the quotation 
from Virgil emphasizes its realistic details : 

And mingled sounds and infant plaints we hear, 
That pierce the entrance shrill, and wound the tender ear. 

The opening stanzas reflect Shenstone's endeavor to 
combine idyllic elements with details of direct observation. 
Shenstone's heart is forlorn "full sorely" to think how mo- 
dest worth lies neglected in the dull shades of obscurity. 
Then follows the setting, which is not wholly idyllic : 

In every village marked with little spire, 
Embowered in trees, and hardly known to Fame, 
There dwells in lowly shed, and mean attire, 
A matron old, whom we Schoolmistress name ; 
Who boasts unruly brats with birch to tame; 
They grieven sore, in piteous durance pent, 
Awed by the power of this relentless dame; 
And oft-times, on vagaries idly bent, 
For unkempt hair, or task unconned, are sorely shent. 

The birch tree under whose wide-waving branches the 
school is sheltered, boded ill to pupils, whose "pulse beat 
low" when the wind rustled in its leaves. Another stanza 
elaborates a guarded protest against flogging, under the 
image of a scarecrow that frightens innocent birds. The sen- 
timent which redounded to the protection of animals, and a 
feeling for their hardships, led Shenstone to notice also the 
hardships of childhood. 



EDUCATION 199 

The dame's scrupulous cleanliness is reflected in her 
simple attire. Her cap was whiter than the driven snow, and 
her apron showed as delicate a blue as the harebell. She 
wore a russet kirtle of her own weaving. Her pupils were 
ranged about her in ''gaping wonderment" and "pious awe." 
She could not be accused of a love for pompous titles, but 
''held right dear" the names bestowed upon her: ''Goody, 
good-woman, gossip, n'aunt, or dame." Like many a par- 
son and schoolmaster of the eighteenth century, she was 
something of an apothecary or herbalist, for she disdained 
mere painted flowers, and cultivated in her garden only 
"herbs for use and physic" ; the "pungent radish, biting in- 
fant's tongue" found its place with "marjoram sweet" and 
lavender for "kerchief clean." On a Sunday evening she 
sat before her door, singing Sternhold's hymns, or in her 
summer seat in the garden retailed Bible stories. She 
admonished children when they were present, and held her 
sway over them when they were out of her sight, for she was 
warned of all their doings : 

if little bird their pranks behold, 
'Twill whisper in her ear, and all the scene unfold. 

These idyllic passages are interwoven with lines of a 
more sombre and forbidding cast. Like White's dame at 
the end of the century, Shenstone's schoolmistress is more 
fonnidable in the schoolroom than without; and the poet 
does not hesitate to portray her in the panoply of her office. 
Her elbow-chair is like the chair "of Scottish stem" in 
which the sovereign is crowned. 

And in her hand, for sceptre, she does wield 
Tway birchen sprays; with anxious fear entwined, 
With dark distrust, and sad repentance filled; 
And stedfast hate, and sharp affliction joined. 
And fury uncontrouled, and chastisement unkind. 



200 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Without her vested power to mete out punishment to "re- 
belHous breasts" by applying the "baleful sprig," there 
would be no ''comely peace of mind, and decent order" in 
English cottages. Clothed with such power 

sits the dame, disguised in look profound, 
And eyes her fairy throng, and turns her wheel around. 

After a stately command from her, the urchins take their 
books in hand. One luckless wight is found contemplating 
the picture of St. George and the Dragon instead of the 
criss-cross row. The dame looses his brogues, and "levels 
well her aim." Discipline evidently depended not on love 
and leading, but on fear, for the dame must flog "Till fear 
has taught them a performance meet." Shenstone's analysis 
of the child mind in this flogging scene shows that he was 
writing with his eye on the object. There is an especially 
convincing bit of psychological analysis in the stanzas that 
trace the fluctuations of emotion in the sister of the boy who 
is being flogged. .Outside of Blake's poetry, this is the 
most extended passage that attempts the portrayal of chil- 
dish emotion. The continued obstinacy of the boy after he 
has been sent to the corner, where he stands with one fist 
in his mouth and the other in his hair, and his stolid refusal 
to be moved by the dame's cajolery and her offering of 
cakes, are well done. But the passage is no more vivid than 
the analysis of the little sister's reaction to her brother's 
peril and disgrace. 

All playful as she sate, she grows demure ; 
She finds full soon her wonted spirits flee; 
She meditates a prayer to set him free : 
Nor gentle pardon could this dame deny 
(If gentle pardon could with dames agree) 
To her sad grief that swells in either eye, 
And wrings her so that all for pity she could dye. 



EDUCATION 201 

No longer can she now her shrieks command; 
And hardly she forbears, through awful fear, 
To rushen forth, and with presumptuous hand. 
To stay harsh Justice in its mid career. 
(Ah ! too remote to ward the shameful blow !) 
She sees no kind domestic visage near, 
And soon a flood of tears begins to flow ; 
And gives a loose at last to unavailing woe. 

When Shenstone moralizes this bit of photographic 
realism, there is a suggestion of romantic protest against 
repression and the dead leveling of pupils which was so 
obnoxious to his schoolmate Jago at Solihul. We are told 
that the dame knew how to thwart the proud and raise the 
stibmissive child : but the poet sounds a warning, neverthe- 
less, against the indiscriminate policy of repression common 
in all schools. The regimen of fear is easily abused by 
authority in power over the little ones. Therefore 

Beware, ye dames, with nice discernment see. 
Ye quench not too the sparks of nobler fires : 
Ah ! better far than all the Muses' lyres, 
All coward arts, is Valour's generous heart; 
The firm fixt breast which fit and right requires, 
Like Vernon's patriot soul! more justly great 
Than Craft that pimps for ill, or flowery false Deceit. 

He sees a little bench of bishops, a chancellor in embryo, 
or a poet who, 

Though now he crawl along the ground so low, 

Nor weeting how the Muse should soar so high, 

Wisheth. poor starveling elf! his paper kite may fly. 

Children should be "nursed with skill" while at school ; for 
''dazzling fruits appear" only when dames teach "with sa- 
gacious foresight." 

The poem closes in a pensive strain, after an idyllic pas- 
sage on the fruits and Shrewsbury cates that tempt chil- 
dren freed from school to part with their pennies. 



202 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Ah ! midst the rest, may flowers adorn his grave, 
Whose art did first these dulcet cates display! 
A motive fair to Learning's imps he gave, 
Who cheerless o'er the darkling region stray; 
Till Reason's morn arise, and light them on their way. 

Shenstone is preoccupied with children whose ages range 
from three to six years. His schoolmistress must have 
combined with her school duties some of the functions of 
a day-nurse. Across the open doorway of the school is an 
"imprisoning-board" 

Lest weakly wights of smaller size should stray; 
Eager, perdie, to bask in sunny day ! 

The dame's "ancient hen," 

Which, ever and anon, impelled by need. 
Into her school, begirt with chickens, came, 

further emphasizes the lack of organization and school at- 
mosphere according to our standards of elementary school 
procedure. In fact, in spite of the poet's conscious effort to 
suffuse the whole with tenderness and sentiment, much of 
which was no doubt true to his recollections of Sarah Lloyd 
and her school at Halesowen, he adhered closely to the 
spirit of the motto. Whatever the idyllic charm of the 
setting and the picturesque dame in her garden or at her 
cottage door, she is not, in the light of modern ideals, at- 
tractive in her schoolroom. It is not a schoolroom full of 
happy, interested, responsive youngsters whose activities are 
lovingly, if scientifically, evoked by a sympathetic teacher 
who has been trained to an understanding of the child mind. 
The fleeting glimpses which Godsmith vouchsafes of the 
village school at Sweet Atiburn (in The Deserted Vil- 
lage, 1770) are seen through a haze of sentiment that does 
not wholly obscure harsh facts. The school was as bare 
and ill regulated as that of Shenstone's schoolmistress. 



EDUCATION 203 

Though the master was "skilled to rule," the poet does not 
obscure the fact that the little school was a ''noisy man- 
sion." The rule of fear by flogging lay at the heart of his 
pedagogy. (Goldsmith's interest is chiefly in the school- 
master, who is seen through the eyes of his pupils, and then 
as reflected in the admiration of the gazing rustics. They 
wonder how one small head could carry all he knew. But 
with the clownish admiration is bound up the unwhole- 
some fear of his pupils, for he was "a man severe" and 
"stern to view." The "boding tremblers" had learned to 
foretell the day's disasters in his "morning face," and were 
not above laughing at his many jokes with "counterfeited 
glee." They were sensitive to the "dismal tidings" im- 
plied in his frowns. ^' Goldsmith, who reveals no interest 
in the problems of the village school, but rather emphasizes 
the picturesque figure of the schoolmaster who heightens the 
efifect of the idyllic background of happy village simplicity, 
nevertheless bears witness to the fact that the schoolmaster 
was, if anything, harsher and more intolerant than the 
schoolmistress. 

About the age of fourteen. White composed his poem 
Childhood, which is colored by the melancholy that was 
characteristic of his temperament and led to his belief that 
childhood also drinks of "the bitter cup of care." The 
school in which he first entered the "low vestibule" of "learn- 
ing's fane" was a cottage over whose mouldering walls the 
mantling woodbine crept. There the "village matron kept 
her little school." She is like Shenstone's schoolmistress in 
her neat habits and industry, and is individualized by her 
use of spectacles. 

1 Compare Charles Lamb's Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty 
Years Ago. 



204 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Faint with old age, and dim were grown her eyes, 
A pair of spectacles their want supplies ; 
These does she guard secure, in leathern case. 
From thoughtless wights, in some unweeted place. 

She was gentle of heart, but like Goldsmith's schoolmaster 
knew how to rule. When the poet was ''harshly" reproved 
before he had become inured to alphabetic toils, he crept 
back to his corner broken-hearted, and wept while thoughts 
of "tender home" passed through his mind. But out of 
school hours, he and his schoolmates gathered about the 
dame's wheel at the door of her cottage to wonder ''how 
'twas her spinning manufactured cloth." Children did not 
fear her at such times, "for out of school she never knew 
to chide." 

Crabbe admired Shenstone's Schoolmistress, and in The 
Parish Register has genuinely graced the humble theme by 
throwing a halo of sanctity and self-sacrifice about the 
"pious mistress." Jn what he calls a digression from the 
story of Dawkins and his orphaned children, he draws a 
sympathetic picture of the matron who assumed the care 
of the youngest orphan. He chooses the moment at the 
close of a summer day when she has dismissed her charges, 
and "frugal of light" sits knitting before her cottage door, 
and "of time as frugal" reads her Bible while she knits. 
"In pure respect" the village lads "walk silent on the grass" 
when they observe her as she closes the day with prayer. 

Crabbe had but scant respect for the poor discarded 
Clelia who finally attempted to eke out a living as matron. 
The terse comment with which he dismisses her, that "na- 
ture gave not talents fit for rule," again serves to emphasize 
the fact that the inculcation of fear was the chief object of 
the discipline of a village schoolmistress (The Borough, 
Letter XV). 



EDUCATION 205 

Crabbe's heartfelt lines on the "letter-loving dame" who 
had taught him his letters, but who was in the closing years 
of her life dependent on the charity of her former charges, 
shows that the teacher in a dame's school was often held 
in high respect. She had inoculated her pupils with the con- 
viction that ''learning is better worth than house or land." 
Half the wealthy and weighty men who rule the borough 
"own the matron as the leading cause" of their success in 
life. Because they feel the "pleasing debt," she is not com- 
pelled to close her useful life in a crowded institution of 
charity, by implication the fate of many dames ; but 

To her own house is borne the week's supply ; 
There she in credit lives, there hopes in peace to die. 

The poet's further personal tribute lovingly recalls in detail 
the pains she took with him in the first steps of learning. 

Can I mine ancient Widow pass unmoved? 
Shall I not think what pains the matron took, 
When first I trembled o'er the gilded book? 
How she, all patient, both at eve and morn. 
Her needle pointed at the guardian horn ; 
And how she soothed me, when, with study sad, 
I laboured on to reach the final zad? 

(The Borough, Letter XVII) 

Such tributes are exceptional in our period. iWhen we 
recall the lines of Pope on the masters of the great endowed 
schools, and West's arraignment not only of their methods, 
but also of their personal habits, together with the strictures 
of Langhorne, Lloyd, and Jago, it is refreshing to come upon 
Lovibond's tribute to his classical master. Lovibond eulo- 
gizes him in at least three poems. Johnson says that "the 
initiatory part of his education Edward Lovibond received 
from the Rev. Mr. Woodeson, of Kingston, upon Thames, 
for whom he ever retained an almost filial affection : a cir- 



206 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

cumstance which is equally honorable to the pupil and the 
preceptor." Lovibond's Verses (written after passing 
through Findon, Sussex, 1768) are addressed to his master, 
who was born at Findon. Lovibond's genuine respect for 
his teacher becomes clear in this graceful tribute. In the 
perennial eighteenth-century discussion of the comparative 
merits of domestic and school education, such a personal 
tribute gives concrete evidence of the success of private 
tuition. 

His master "was one of those amiable beings whom 
none could know without loving. To the abilities of an 
excellent scholar was united a mind so candid, so patient, 
so replete with universal benevolence, that it glowed in 
every action. His life was an honor to himself, to religion, 
to human nature. He preserved to his death such simplicity 
of manners as is rarely to be met with. He judged of the 
world by the standard of his own virtuous heart; and few 
men who had seen such length of days ever left it so little 
acquainted with it." The unworldly qualities of his master 
stand out against the unpleasant characteristics emphasized 
in the poetry of the period : 

Thou wert not born to plough the neighbouring main. 

Or plant thy greatness near Ambition's throne ; 
Or count unnumbered fleeces on thy plain: 

— The Muses loved and nursed thee for their own! 

And twined thy temples here with wreaths of worth, 

And fenced thy childhood from the blights of morn, 

And taught enchanting song, and sent thee forth 
To stretch the blessing to an age unborn. 

In the poem he wrote upon the occasion of his former mas- 
ter's house being converted into a poor-house, Lovibond 
recalls the ''gracious children, and the faithful wife" who 
welcomed him at their ''social board." There in "Simplici- 
ty's abode" 



EDUCATION 207 

the good teacher held by turns to youth 
The blaze of fiction and pure light of truth, 
Who, less by precept than example fired, 
Glowed as he taught, inspiring and inspired. 

Lovibond writes of nature polished by "classic art" ; yet the 
virtue of the place lies in its having been in his day ''Sim- 
plicity's abode," 

Where smiling hinocence looked up to God ; 

Where Nature's genuine graces charmed the heart. 

The influence of Rousseau is clear also in the Dedication 
of Julias Letter: 

thou who sitst in academic schools. 

Less teaching than inspiring ancient art, 
Thy own example nobler than their rules, 

Thy blameless life best lesson for the heart. ^ 

In 1798 Lancaster's Borough Road School advertised ad- 
vanced doctrine with which many elementary schools in 
Great Britain have not caught up even today. - In that school, 
honorary orders of merit were worn until they were for- 
feited by misbehaviour, the "forfeiture being in lieu of 

1 Compare William Whitehead's To the Rev. Dr. Louth: 

So let me still with filial love pursue 
The muse and parent of my infant thought, 
From whence the color of my life I drew, 
When Bigg presided, and when Burton taught. 

- Compare Dr. Johnson's remarks on Mr. Hunter, his head- 
master: ''He used ... to beat us unmercifully; and he did not 
distinguish between ignorance and negligence; for he would beat a 
boy equally for not knowing a thing, as for neglecting to know it." 
But he also said of him : "My master whipt me very well. Without 
that, Sir, I should have done nothing." Concerning Dr. Rose's 
lenient methods, Johnson remarked : "There is now less flogging in 
our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so 
that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other." (Bos- 
well's Johnson). 



208 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

corporal punishment." Less than five years after this an- 
nouncement, Barrow was irritated by observing that some 
schools preferred not to flog. He contends that the acqui- 
sition of learning must always be laborious and that only 
the authority of the teacher can confine his pupil to irk- 
some and continued application. By authority he means 
flogging : ''Yet perhaps without the use or the fear of it not 
a single scholar was ever made." With such doctrine de- 
liberately promulgated even during the liberalizing age of 
romanticism, it is small wonder that Fielding, who had a 
tender feeling for Eton, should associate his schooldays 
there with the birch rod: "To thee at thy birchen altar 
with true Spartan devotion have I sacrificed." ^ Cowper 
characterizes school life as the "whip-gig state" in Hope, 
and in The Valediction alludes to Colman, 

Thy schoolfellow and partner of thy plays 

(Where-,' Nichol swung the birch and twined the bays. 

In The Progress of Error he is more explicit : 

Plants raised with tenderness are seldom strong, 
Man's coltish disposition asks the thong, 
And without discipline the favourite child, 
Like a neglected forester, runs wild. 

The poets, however, do not as a rule treat the custom of 
flogging with the lightheartedness of the great novelist. 
Chatterton's indignant infant muse would give advice to men 
when it calls the education of his day the "offspring illegi- 
timate of Pain," an accusation hardly stronger than West's 
condemnation of persecuting "free-created souls with penal 
terror's awe." 

1 Compare Tom Jones: for Partridge, the barber and school- 
master; and also for Thwackum. Note also Smollett's diverting 
paragraphs on flogging in Peregrine Pickle, and his delineation of 
schoolmasters and tutors in Keypstick, Jennings, and Jolter. 



EDUCATION 209 

The evidence of poets that educational methods are co- 
ercive rather than directive is corroborated by the statutes 
of endowed and other schools. The ordinances of Chigwell 
School (Essex) direct, ''That for speaking English in the 
Latin School, the Scholar be corrected with the Ferula : and 
for swearing, with the Rod." The Regulations at Witton, 
near Northwitch (Chester), stipulate: "3rd In inflicting per- 
sonal chastisement, he shall use only the Cane, except in 
cases of gross misbehaviour, when the Trustees must be 
consulted as to any other punishment." The "P. W." note 
which explains the "dreadful wand" held by the spectre in 
the Dunciad, informs the reader it was "a cane usually borne 
by Schoolmasters, which drives poor souls about like the 
wand of Mercury." That the elementary schools were 
conducted according to the doctrine of fear finds an almost 
amusing illustration in the Reports of the Society for Bet- 
tering the Condition of the Poor: "Both of the m. stresses are 
enjoined to treat the children tenderly ; and not to use the 
rod, except in cases of necessity. But, in order to reconcile 
their young minds to flogging, when necessary, several 
sayings of King Solomon are put in a conspicuous part of 
the schools, and read once a quarter, so as to attract their 
attention and shew them the advantage of their being whipt." 

The reactionary Somerville does not frown upon such 
pedagogical methods, but takes it as a matter of course that 
Gamaliel "with ruling rod trains up his babes of grace." 
His observations are good natured and tolerant, although 
he realizes that genius can not be forced in the schools. It 
is very plain that an ape can not be made an alderman, even 
by the redoubtable master at Westminster. 

But, by your leave, good doctor Freind, 

When maggots once are in the brain, 
Whole loads of birch are spent in vain. 1 
1 The Fortune-Hunter. 



210 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The conservative Doctor Johnson unsuccessfully de- 
fended Hastie, schoohnaster of Campbelltown, by contend- 
ing that "no scholar had gone from him either blind or lame, 
or with any of his limbs or powers injured or impaired." 
And Cowper wrote that a person who obstinately held to 
''mulish folly" and would not be reclaimed by softer meth- 
ods, must be made ashamed. Poets in general, however, 
showed nothing but indignation or contempt for flogging. 
In Carnziforth School (1769) Graeme speaks of rescuing 
''Defenceless childhood from the scourge of age." Jenyns 
may contend that sages must be "cudgelled into sense," but 
in The Dean and the Squire Mason can not understand the 
educational value of physical punishment when a 

Pedantic schoolmaster like York, 
Thrashes the wretch with grammar's flail, 
To mend his head corrects his tail ; 
And this with most despotic fury, 
Heedless of mercy, law, and jury. 

In The Fortune-Hunter, Somerville observed the same facts 
in a more tolerant mood : 

His bum was often brushed, you'll say ; 
'Tis true; now twice, then thrice a day: 
So leeches at the breech are fed. 
To cure vertigos in the head. 

Pope's satiric muse in the Dunciad did not overlook the 
possibilities of the situation for a poetic castigation of school 
methods : 

The pale Boy-Senator yet tingling stands, 

And holds his breeches close with both his hands. {IV) 

Cawthorn's lines in Wit and Learning (1757) suggest the 
direct and brutal attack of a master : 

I'll lay thee, miscreant ! on my knee, 

And paint such welks thy naked seat on, 

As never truant felt at Eton. 



EDUCATION 211 

Clara Reeve, who is usually liberal in her opinions on 
education, says of a certain pedagogue that "he was indeed 
too apt to use the rod, which was the ensign of his authority, 
and made the boys rather fear than love him.'' Her sym- 
pathies are clearly with the pupil. She found Arthur, who 
had been severely flogged, kicking his book before him ("it 
was Lily's Grammar") while "his heart heaved, his color 
rose, and he burst into tears." ^ 

Byrom was sufficiently enlightened to realize that fear 
of the rod would not induce a sincere love of learning : 

Homer, Virgil, Horace! (if you ask) 

Why, yes, the rod would send me to my task; 

But all the consultation that came out 

Had its own end — to 'scape the whipping bout. 2 

Barrow observed in 1802 that many masters of private 
schools had published essays, presumably on pedagogical 
subjects, the sole aim of which was to advertise their schools. 
S. Johnson's Education (1771), a poem in two parts, illus- 
trates how one master skilfully combined the traditional at- 
titude toward the classics with the new spirit manifest in 
poets who noticed school affairs. S. Johnson's poem de- 
rives from Pope's Dunciad in its protest against flogging 

1 Destination, vol. i, p. 72. 

2 Epistle to a Friend. — In the Spectator (1711) Steele writes: 
"I am confident that no boy who will not be allured to letters with- 
out blows, will ever be brought to anything with them. A great 
or good mind must necessarily be the worse for such indignities." 
It was repugnant to Steele that boys should kneel to a blockhead 
because of a false Latin quantity. In later life he still dreamed of 
his master once a month and could not forget his bloody schoolboy 
hand. (Compare Pope's "Till birch shall blush with noble blood 
no more"; and "dropping with infant's blood.") Steele goes on to 
say that "if you can disarm them of their rods, you will certainly 
have your old age reverenced by all the young gentlemen of Great 
Britain who are now between seven and seventeen." 



212 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

and repression, and at the same time serves to advertise 
the author as a progressive who is acquainted with Rous- 
seau. The edition of 1771 artfully serves the purposes of 
poetry, pedagogy, and pubHcity. 

S. Johnson conducted a school in Shrewsbury, where he 
gave his pupils instruction in "Language, History, Geo- 
graphy, and in the use of Globes . . . the French lan- 
guage, and Drawing in all its branches, on the most reason- 
able terms." His poem is very plainly an advertisement of 
his school ; it closes with an unmistakable ad captan- 
dum to the ladies, who as fond mothers and aunts would 
exert no inconsiderable influence in the choice of a school. 
This point of view, however unfavorable to art, is valuable 
as indicating the pedagogical attitude which a capable 
master considered attractive to the clientele of his school. ^ 

S. Johnson's classical attainments are displayed in foot- 
notes by means of quotations from Sappho, Lucretius, Pliny, 
Cireco, Juvenal and others who are made to support his 
trite observations on life. To show that he is at the same 
time abreast of his generation, he quotes also from Rouss- 
eau's Emile (1762). Rousseau's works were translated as 
soon as published, and were widely known through reviews 
in the magazines. Emile commanded the attention of Eng- 
lish readers everywhere, to arouse opposition, ridicule, or, at 
times, partial approval.- Rousseau's return to nature was 
readily assimilated because it was in harmony with contem- 
porary English thought. Johnson shows unmistakably that 
in his mind the idea of giving child nature free play in 
education is connected with Rousseau. After condemning 

1 S. Johnson is, of course, not the great Samuel Johnson. 

2 Compare Observations on Mr. Rousseau's New System of 
Education with some remarks on the different translations of that 
celebrated work. In a letter to a friend . . . London, Cadell, 1763. 
— See also Jacques Pons, op. cit., passim, for additional titles. 



EDUCATION 213 

the attitude of parents who force a booby son into one of 
the learned professions, Johnson calls attention to the sinewy 
limbs and simple mind that "nature for other purposes de- 
signed." The word nature carries an asterisk that refers 
the reader to Rousseau's Einile: Voulez-vous toujours etre 
bien guide? Suivez toujours les indications de la Nature." 
He develops his thought by indicating how many a strong- 
limbed man curses his meddling parents for having forced 
him to enter a profession in which he starves by his pen, 
when he was "gifted with nerves the manly axe to wield." 

List then, oh list, ye fools, to Nature's voice. 
Thwart not her dictates, but indulge her choice. 
She plainly shews you where her bias leans, 
And, for the end she aims at, yields the means : 
Be not less rational than brutes, whose young 
Receive what culture doth to brutes belong. 

The italicized phrase had Nature been obeyed occurs four 
times in tweny-five consecutive lines. He advises the teach- 
er that nature should be the "cynosure by which he steers." 
Yet Johnson, like all true Britishers since the fourteenth 
century, is suspicious of anything that comes out of France. 
He expresses a fine scorn for the "mamma" who fetched 
two tutors out of France, one to teach the child to mock 
English manners and to garnish his skull while leaving the 
mind undisturbed, and the second to teach the child to jab- 
ber French before he quits his go-cart — ^with the result that 
the child's brain has been neglected while his morals have 
been corrupted. ^ Johnson's anti-Gallic attitude is as ob- 
vious as that of Mrs. Trimmer and Mrs. Sherwood, al- 
though he does not take the anti-Rousseau attitude of Clara 

1 Cp. Cawthorn's Equality of Human Conditions ("spoken at 
the annual visitation of Tunbridge School, 1746") : 

While airy Belville, guiltless of a school, 
Shines out a French edition of a fool. 



214 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Reeve (1799). In Destination she illustrates her point by 
relating a story that shows the fruits of an education such as 
that advocated by ''John James Rousseau" : "I relate this 
true story as an antidote to the poisonous doctrine lately in- 
culcated, that children are neither to be contradicted nor 
corrected." 

S. Johnson's poem is both an obvious and typical illus- 
tration of the severe limitations with which Rousseau's 
doctrines were received in England. When Johnson, near the 
close of his poem, favors guiding the child according to his 
natural gifts, "with tender hand to rear the infant state," 
he again supports his line with a quotation from Emile. 
But he loses himself immediately in the traditional pedagogy 
devised for the institutional child : 

Support its weakness, ere it run to waste, 

To lop the rampant shoot, which strong and rude 

Warps it from all that's beautiful and good ; 

To touch the mind with emulation's flame, 

With ridicule, or keener sense of shame. 

His long quotations from the Dunciad, and the constant and 
vehement denunciation of flogging, indicate that the influen- 
ces working on him were essentially native English. It 
was modern in 1771 to show an acquaintance with Emile, 
and the doctrine of following nature was beginning to be 
accepted. However limited the application of Rousseau's 
doctrines, they nevertheless had a liberating influence that 
accelerated the native tendency away from the nar- 
row classical curriculum and all its abuses. The ideal Pre- 
ceptor is one who knows 

The manners of each circling age; 
To bend not break their Minds ; their little rage 
And humors hit; their passions how to stir; 
When to exert the rein, when use the spur ; 
For different Minds a different treatment ask. 



EDUCATION 215 

Rousseau's ideal method of teaching by example and 
guidance is favorably noticed. This was the least radical 
of Rousseau's contentions. Yet even here Johnson can not 
break away from traditional methods; for where he con- 
demns flogging in the first part (The Pedant), he considers 
it proper when used with discretion, and defends it with 
limitations in the second part (The Preceptor). In reality 
his objection is not to flogging, but rather to the manner of 
administering the beating indiscriminately for the most tri- 
vial offenses. 

See innocence arraigned before his throne 

For some slight error of the brain alone. 

Half dead with shame, abashed, appalled he stands ; 

Grief drowns his voice, while terror lifts his hands. 

Lo, on his knees the little suppliant falls, 

In piercing cries for mercy, mercy calls. 

Oh hear him, hear him, and for once receive, 

Once taste that heavenly pleasure to forgive. 

"No, let him smart" replies the unfeeling clod, 

"He spoils the child who spares the rod." 

Oh, maxim ill applied. ^ 

1 Henry Brooke, author of The Fool of Quality (1766), would 
under any but prevailing conditions not have introduced the tutor 
of the boys as Mr, Vindex, the symbol of whose office is "that tree 
whose bare name strikes terror through all our seminaries of learn- 
ing." Brooke does not hesitate to draw the character of this vin- 
dictive example of eighteenth-century pedagogue in strong terms : 
"Air Vindex began to assume a more expanded authority, and gave 
a free scope to the surly terrors of his station." And again : "The 
next day Mr. Vindex returned, doubly armed, with a monstrous 
birch-rod in one hand, and a ferule in the other." From the author's 
apostrophies on the wrongheadedness of this pedagogue, and from the 
details of the story, one may get a fairly accurate conception of "the 
three accustomed strokes." — Compare Tom Jones (Book HI, Chap- 
ter VI) : "Castigo te non quod odio habeam, sed quod Amem. I 
chastise thee not out of hatred, but out of love." — In Roderick Ran- 
dom the boys bind and beat their master in the schoolroom. 



216 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

As is clear from poetry since the Dimciad, most peda- 
gogues are wholly repressive in their methods. S. Johnson 
carries on the protest against the clan, and can find no 
word strong enough to express his contempt. The following 
words appear in rapid succession — '"mercenary," "pedant," 
"leaden crown," "meanest of the flogging train," "the 
Thwackum of my age," "tigers and wolves have more hu- 
manity," "from their limbs their tender skin you tear," 
"barbarian," "caitiff," "scorpion." 

But for the herd of pedagogues, — I know 
Not any such pernicious weeds that grow ; 
Like other weeds too, they aspire to curb 
The kindly progress of each other herb. 

Lancaster's attempt to abolish corporal punishment rep- 
resents a master's liberal views after the influence of Rous- 
seau had made itself felt in England. Schoolboys them- 
selves finally rebelled, as in the instance of Wordsworth's 
friend Matthews, who had attended the Merchant Tailors' 
School where he had taken part in a revolt that led to the 
abolition of flogging in that institution. In general, how- 
ever, the practice continued into the nineteenth century, and 
was defended by Doctor Arnold of Rugby. He still believed 
in the "natural inferior state of boyhood," and held that ob- 
jections to flogging originate in "that proud notion of per- 
sonal independence which is neither reasonable nor Chris- 
tian, but essentially barbarian." Dickens, who was a true 
friend of children, and broke many a lance in their defense, 
was able after 1830 to find fourteen types of coercion for 
discussion in connection with his exposure of abuses in 
English schools. ^ 

Early in the century Isaac Watts had recognized the 
value of gentleness and kindness in the guidance and edu- 

^ Dickens as an Educator by James L. Hughes. 



EDUCATION 217 

cation of children. He was quick to recognize these 
quahties in a schoohnaster Hke his friend Thomas Rowe, to 
whom he addressed the poem To the much-honoured Mr. 
Thomas Roz(je, the Director of my Youthful Studies. But 
whereas he praises Rowe for the quahties Lovibond saw in 
Woodeson, much of the emphasis is still, because of the 
age in which the poem was written, on the negative element 
of protest against the binding customs and magic chains of 
the schools. Berkeley, on the other hand, leaves Europe be- 
hind as hopelessly old and fixed in her ways. In Verses 
on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America, 
written about 1726, and published in 1752, he looks to the 
new world, youthful and strong, to redress the educational 
grievances of the old world. He would make a new start 
that is impossible under prevailing conditions in Europe. 

In happy climes, the seat of Innocence, 

Where nature guides and virtue rules, 

Where men shall not impose for truth and sense 
The pendantry of courts and schools : 

There shall be sung another golden age. 

The rise of empire and of arts, 
The good and great inspiring epic rage. 

The wisest heads and noblest hearts. 
Not such as Europe breeds in her decay ; 

Such as she bred when fresh and young, 
When heavenly flame did animate her clay. 

Although no practical reforms seem to have been made in 
the schools, poets had definitely cleared the way for Words- 
w^orth's statement of a plan for national education of the 
masses. Wordsworth's denunciation of the state's neglect 
of its children is no stronger, however, than his strictures on 
the educational fads reflected in the many systems of home 
education which were devised to take the place of the 



218 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

discredited established curriculum before the days of na- 
tionally supervised common schools. To understand his 
attitude toward the education of children, it is essential 
to note the comment of poets on books and reading matter 
for children. 



CHAPTER V 
CHILDREN'S BOOKS 

Except for William Blake's Songs of Innocence, litera- 
ture intended for children is as dreary at the close as at the 
opening of the century. Various forces at work through- 
out the century, but with special vigor at the opening and 
close, had as their avowed object the making over of the 
child according to preconceived ideas and plans of a moral 
and religious nature. The Society for the Promotion of 
Christian Knozvledge had as its province the inculcation of 
religious and moral precepts among children of the Estab- 
lishment and, in many instances, of dissenting communities 
also. The restless activities in dissenting circles had as 
their chief object the salvaging of the souls of children 
from the grip of the Devil and all his forces. During the 
last quarter of the century, the results of awakened inter- 
est in scientific matters were painfully obvious in literature 
intended for children. These publications reveal clearly a 
tendency to secularize subject matter, but in method show 
a propagandist spirit that had as its objective the making 
over of the child into a young savant. In other words, the 
child at the close of the century was still nurtured on the in- 
stitutional plan. Where Isaac Watts in the first quarter 
had been stimulated by religious ideals, Mrs. Barbauld, 
Aikin, Day, and the Edgeworths in the last quarter were in 
addition fired by enthusiasm for moral tales which incor- 
porated natural science. Even Newberry, in the middle of 
the century, was not altruistic in combining the functions 
of a publisher of children's books with those of a dispenser 
of patent medicines ; and his stories had also their reward 



220 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

for virtue, and punishment for evil. Unfortunately, Blake's 
peculiar methods of publication restricted his audience to 
such an extent that his delightful lyrics for children could 
not seriously compete with less worthy publications. 

While Prior was developing complimentary verse on 
childhood to its highest perfection in the classicist manner, 
and while Swift was composing stinging satires on the me- 
chanical use of childhood, non-conformist writers were car- 
rying on propaganda from which emerged in 1720 the 
Divine Songs for Children and Moral Songs of Isaac 
Watts. For a proper understanding of this epoch-making 
contribution to poetry on childhood, it is necessary to notice 
briefly the religious and social environment from which it 
sprang. 

The characteristic mood of the non-conformists was one 
of gloom. The doctrine of election led them to practice 
introspection in order to discover conformity with the 
wishes of God. They feared the wrath of God because of 
their sinful nature. Original sin was more than a doctrine ; 
it was a grim reality that stood between them and eternal 
salvation. Like Donne and his followers in the seventeenth 
century, they were preoccupied with death and the grave. 
In their essentially ascetic outlook, the life of the senses 
was an evil to be avoided if they wished to escape hell fire. 
They did not allow themselves even the natural love of 
children, ''those tempting things." At the end of the first 
section of Watts's Horae Lyricae are certain poems "pe- 
culiarly dedicated to Divine Love." The first of the group 
has the title The Hazard of Loving the Creatures. Watts 
pursues the argument that whatever love is given to 
friends and relatives leaves so much less for God. Men 
must control natural instincts in the interests of salvation. 
This is especially necessary in relation to children. 



children's books 221 

Nature has soft and powerful bands, 

And Reason she controls; 
While children with their little hands 

Hang closest to our souls. 

Thoughtless they act th' old Serpent's part; 

What tempting things they be! 
Lord, how they twine about our heart, 

And draw it ofif from thee ! 

Face to face with grim spiritual realities, it was essential 
that man should fight sin at the source. Salvation was 
conditioned upon the realization of one's sinful nature. In 
his thirty-ninth sermon, on the Right Improvement of Life, 
Watts warns his congregation that "this is the time that 
was given you for your reconciliation with God, and secur- 
ing vour everlasting interest. All the elect are born into 
this world sinful and miserable. ... We are all, by na- 
ture . . . under sentence of condemnation." The child is 
born sinful ; therefore it must be made to realize the pre- 
carious state in which it lives. It becomes the duty of 
parents to instruct their children. The growing soul of the 
parent, doubled in wedlock, and multiplied in children, 

Stands but the broader mark for all the mischiefs 
That rove promiscuous o'er the mortal stage. 

That parents might not become slack in this fundamental 
matter, clergymen exhorted them in sermons, and as prac- 
tical helps wrote manuals for use with children. It is at 
this point that we meet Janeway in the seventeenth century 
and Watts in the eighteenth. ^ 

1 See John Ashton's Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, 
vol I p 184 Ashton quotes from the lost and found columns of 
a periodical: 'Taken from a child, a gold chain with this motto, 
Memento Mori." 



222 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

As the writer of this study holds in his hand a Httle yel- 
low book, wrinkled and faded with age, there rises from 
its pages a spirit of earnestness and rigid duty — a gloomy 
sincerity of purpose. It was written by James Janeway, 
and is entitled A Token for Children, being an exact ac- 
count of the conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lizfes and 
Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children ( 167 1- 1672). 

In this little manual for children, Janeway appeals to 
parents: 'Take some time daily to speak a little to your 
children one by one about their miserable condition by na- 
ture. I know a child that was converted by this sentence 
from a godly schoolmistress in the country : 'Every mother's 
child of you are by nature children of wrath.' Put your 
children upon learning their catechism, and the Scriptures, 
and getting to pray and weep by themselves after Christ." 
Janeway is sufficiently specific and picturesque to command 
attention: ''And dare you neglect so direct a command? 
Are the souls of your children of no value? Are you will- 
ing that they should be brands of hell ? Are you indifferent 
whether they be damned or saved? Shall the devil run 
away with them without control? Will you not use your 
utmost endeavor to deliver them from the wrath to come?" 
And he proceeds more directly to children themselves by 
stating, "They are not too little to die. . . . They are not 
too little to go to hell." Example One contains these sen- 
tences : "Miss Sarah Howley — when she was between eight 
and nine years old, was carried by her friends to hear a 
sermon, where the minister preached upon Mat. 11, 31 — 
My yoke is easy and my burden is light. In the applying 
of which Scripture, this child was highly awakened, and 
made deeply sensible of the condition of her soul." In the 
following sentence there is direct testimony to show what 
was expected of children at the age of eight: "O mother, 



children's books 223 

said she, it is not any particular sin of omission or commis- 
sion, that sticks so close to my conscience, as the sin of my 
nature ; without the blood of Christ, that will damn me." 

The poems of Isaac Watts were composed in this tra- 
dition. 'Several of his songs persist in twentieth-century 
anthologies of children's lyrics. He has a niche in the 
''Lives" of Johnson, who in the condescending manner he 
often assumed toward schoolmasters and matters pertain- 
ing to children, holds that Watts is "at least one of the few 
poets with whom youth and ignorance may be safely 
pleased." Taking further notice of the divine's preoccu- 
pation with childhood, Johnson writes that Watts "condes- 
cended to lay aside the scholar, the philosopher, and the wit, 
to write little poems of devotion, and systems of instruction, 
adapted to their wants and capacities, from the dawn of 
reason through its gradations of advance in the morning of 
Hfe. Every man, acquainted with the common principles 
of human action, will look with veneration on the writer, 
who is at one time combating Locke, and at another making 
a catechism for children in their fourth year. A voluntary 
descent from the dignity of science is perhaps the hardest 
lesson that humility can teach." He credits Watts with 
having overcome the blunt, coarse, and inelegant style of 
the dissenters by showing them that "zeal and purity might 
be expressed and enforced by polished diction." It was 
by Johnson's recommendation that the poems of Watts were 
included in the collection for which Johnson wrote his 
"Lives." 

Watts was indeed an innovator. He defied Calvinistic 
tradition in many ways, but always successfully, as the 
vogue of his books in the eighteenth century indicates. In 
composing his hymns it was necessary to ignore the em- 
bargo Calvin had laid on everything but metrical psalms 
and canticles. Although hampered also by the dearth of 



224 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

tunes, his hymns, many of them for children, took the dis- 
senting world by storm. He gave '*an utterance, till then 
unheard in England, to the spiritual emotions, and made 
hymn singing a fervid devotional force." The Divine 
Songs for Children and Moral Songs (1720), which ran 
through one hundred editions before 1750, was, according 
to Canon Leigh Bennett, the first child's hymn book in Eng- 
lish. ^ This path-breaking collection is made up of thirty- 
six songs, the book being directed to "all that are concerned 
in the education of children." The opening sentence of his 
Preface reminds one of the seriousness of Janeway. *Tt is 
an awful and important charge that is committed to you." 
Then follow paragraphs of apology for the use of verse. 
His third reason is to the point: "This will be a constant 
furniture for the minds of children, that they may have 
something to think upon when alone, and sing over to them- 
selves. This may sometimes give their thoughts a divine 
turn, and raise a young meditation. Thus they will not 
be forced to seek relief for an emptiness of mind, out of the 
loose and dangerous sonnets of the age." 

His titles indicate the kind of furniture Watts thought 
fit for little minds. Some are of a general nature : General 
Song of Praise to God, Praise for Creation and Providence, 
Praise for the Gospel, Excellency of the Bible. These are 
phrased in simple diction adapted to children. Then fol- 
low more specific subjects, in a more imaginative strain, 
Praise for Mercies Spiritual and Temporal, for instance. 

How many children in the street 

Half naked I behold! 
While I am clothed from head to feet, 

And covered from the cold. 

1 But compare Bishop Ken's "Manual of Prayers for Win- 
chester Scholars" (1674), and "Hymns for Morning, Evening, and 
Midnight" (1695). 



CHILDREN S BOOKS 



225 



Patriotism is inculcated in Praise for Birth and Education 
in a Christian Land: 

'Tis to thy sovereign grace I owe 
That I was born on British ground; 
Where streams of heavenly mercy flow, 
And words of sweet salvation sound. ^ 

I would not change my native land 
For rich Peru with all her gold; 
A nobler prize lies in my hand, 
Than East or Western Indies hold. 

Practical application of moral precepts to the daily life 
of children is made in Against Lying, Love Betiveen 
Brothers and Sisters, Against Scoffing and Calling Names, 
Taking God's Name in Vain, Against Idleness and Mischief, 
Evil Company, Pride in Clothes, and Obedience to Parents. 
Of this group, Against Quarreling and Fighting has per- 
sisted to our day. 

Let bears and lions growl and fight, 

For God hath made them so; 
Let dogs delight to bark and bite, 

For 'tis their nature too. 

But, children, you should never let 

Such angry passions rise ; 
Your little hands were never made 

To tear each other's eyes. 

Against Idleness and Mischief, which is also familiar, has 
survived because its phrasing as well as its moral is neat. 
The language and imagery are conceived in the admiring 
mood of childhood. 

2 Vain of our beauteous isle, and justly vain, 

For freedom here, and Health, and Plenty reign; 
We different lots contemptuously compare, 
And boast, like children, of a favourite's share. 

(Langhorne's Enlargement of the Mind. 1763). 



226 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

How doth the Httle busy bee 

Improve each shining hour, 
And gather honey all the day 

From every opening flower ! 

How skilfully she builds her cell ! 

How neat she spreads the wax ! 
And labours hard to store it well 

With the sweet food she makes. 

Even partial quotation serves to indicate his approach 
to the child mind. The place which animals held in the 
poetry of the century has already been noticed. Animals 
are in fact the first active interest of children. Kipling 
in the Jttst So Stories and the Jungle Books appealed to the 
same keen delight of children in animal life as the early 
Watts in the illustrative stanzas of his songs. Grimm's 
Fairy Tales teem with animals that are often humanized 
agents in the action. One need not look for a literary an- 
tecedent in Aesop's Fables, which were almost universally 
read by children at this time, or in the Bestiary, Old Testa- 
ment prophecy, New Testament accounts of the Christ 
child, or in the Saints Legends of the infancy of Christ. 
The folk lore of all peoples is crowded with animals. Watts 
was sufficiently attuned to the child mind to introduce 
naturally the phenomena of animal life. 

Children are conceived dramatically as speaking in a 
simple didactic way. This manner is easily convincing in 
stanzas where the illustrative matter is visualized. Bibli- 
cal illustrations are also introduced in a homely phrasing 
that bears witness to the imaginative vigor and simplicity of 
the poet's style. In Love Between Brothers and Sisters the 
first stanza suggests a picture of street brawls, and brothers 
and sisters at peace in the home. The second stanza opens 
with "Birds in their little nests agree." In the third he 
speaks of clubs and naked swords, the latter not poetic li- 



children's books 227 

cense, as swords were carried at that time. Watts adheres 
to his purpose of sinking the language to the level of a 
child's understanding. As he is careful to avoid artificial 
adornment, so he usually succeeds in bringing forward Bib- 
lical instances in colloquial and idiomatic phrasing: 

The Devil tempts one mother's son 

To rage against another; 
So wicked Cain was hurried on 

Till he had killed his brother. 

Watts was professedly liberal in his conception of a body 
of verse for children. ''So that you will find here nothing 
that savours of a party ; the children of high and low de- 
gree, of the Church of England or Dissenters, baptized in 
infancy, or not, may all join together in these Songs." His 
songs nevertheless were conditioned by the sectarian no- 
tions of his immediate public. It conceived of all poetry 
as vain and dangerous, and preferred the flattest transla- 
tions of the psalms, sung in tunes of equal dullness. Watts 
himself takes note of the narrower view of life while medi- 
tating in a grove, when he warns off vain thoughts by say- 
ing that no Phyllis shall infect the air with her unhallowed 
name. The sterner elements of Janeway come to the sur- 
face in such songs as Solemn Thoughts of God and Death, 
Heaven and Hell, and Danger of Delay. In Scoffing and 
Calling Names the grim reality of the anthropomorphic con- 
ception comes out when the child is made to exclaim 

Great God, how terrible art thou 
To sinners e'er so young! 

The limitations of the pessimistic traditions that he in- 
herits lead Watts, as in Danger of Delay, into unrelieved 
glooms. Children for whom he intended his songs were 
not permitted to live in a delightful period which is made 



228 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

happy through the absence of self-consciousness and ig- 
norance of life. The child is led to ask why it should 
say that it is yet too early to think of death, for a flower 
may fade before noon, and the child may die this day. 

'Tis dangerous to provoke a God ! 

His power and vengeance none can tell ; 

One stroke of his Almighty rod 

Shall send young sinners quick to Hell. 

It is this strain in Watts that has led writers on children 
to class him as of the revengeful school. Tradition and 
environment were again too strong for him in the beau- 
tiful Cradle Hymn, which he need not have printed apolo- 
getically at the end of his collection of songs. The poem 
shows the conflict between the gentle love of the man Watts 
and the theology of the sectarian Watts. The lovely open- 
ing stanza with its delicate conception of the infant and the 
blessing gently falling upon it, shades into less appealing 
emotions of the mother who becomes incensed over the 
''cursed sinners" who could provide nothing but a manger 
for their lord. It makes her angry to read the shameful 
story of how the Lord was abused. She tells her infant 
that he has been saved from '* burning flame", "bitter 
groans", and "endless crying." Alice Morse Earle impa- 
tiently dismisses the poem : "This certainly seems an ill- 
phrased and exciting lullaby, but is perhaps what might be 
expected is the notion of a soothing cradle hymn from a bi- 
goted old bachelor." Although one may agree with the 
statement in the particular instance which called it forth, it 
is historically somewhat unfair in view of the advanced po- 
sition taken by Watts in the composition of poems for 
children. Severely limited as he was by his antecedents 
and environment, Watts is not altogether a bigot either in 
his life or in his songs for children. To be sure, his ser- 



children's books 229 

mons and Horae Lyricac are with ''rank Geneva weeds run 
o'er," but much in the same way and for the same reasons 
that the work of the neo-classical poets is embellished with 
cupids and Greek and Roman goddesses. Sprat was horri- 
fied that Milton should have been named in a Latin epitaph 
on the tomb of J. Philipps in Westminster Abbey, and or- 
dered the offensive line obliterated. Although there was 
much bitter wrangling between Puritans and the Establish- 
ment, Watts showed his liberal spirit in that he would not 
impose a belief in the Trinity on independent ministers, and 
in that he was willing to surrender the doctrine of infant 
baptism if the Baptists would forego immersion. In the 
dismal Young Men and Maidens, Old Men and Babes a 
parenthetical aside illuminates the man on the liberal side, 
which could not be wholly suppressed. And as for the ac- 
cusation that he was a bachelor, a study of eighteenth- 
century poetry will reveal that a large part of the poetry of 
the century was in the hands of bachelor poets. 

In the encyclopedic nature of his mind Watts was a true 
son of the eighteenth century. Every possible phase of his 
parishioners' education, even to the minutiae of their amuse- 
ments, was noticed by him. His range lies from an essay 
on the art of reading and writing English with a variety 
of instructions for true spelling, to an attempt at a Brief 
System of Ontology. He wrote on ''A Preservation from 
the sins and follies of Childhood and Youth, or a brief ac- 
count of the sins, vices, and frailties to which Childhood 
and youth are liable," etc. He composed prayers for the 
use of children. They are graded carefully from child- 
hood to youth. In verse and prose he provided for his 
parishioners a visualization of their aspirations, desires, ex- 
periences, and theological convictions, from the cradle to 
the time of their appearance before the throne of the Al- 



230 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

mighty. We come upon cradle songs, elegies, sick-bed 
prayers, didactic pieces, and hymns of praise. In all of 
these there are unmistakable signs of a true appreciation of 
childhood and a recognition of the interests of children. 
Considered from the purely secular point of view, warped 
as the man is by professional and theological preoccupa- 
tions, and conditioned and limited as he is by tradition, 
so that we find children innocently playing the tempter's 
part, fearing eternal doom, or drawing the heart of man 
from a Calvinistic conception of God, yet amid the gloom 
of the Mourning-Piece they are 

Children, those dear young limbs, those tenderest pieces, 
Of your own flesh, those little other selves. 
How they dilate the heart to wide dimensions. 

Such phrasings, imbedded as they often are in brim- 
stone lines that Mrs. Trimmer eliminated when she com- 
piled his songs at the close of the century, make Watts an 
exceptional figure during the first half of the century. His 
own limitations were clear to him: ''May some happier 
genius promote the same service that I proposed, and by 
superior sense, and sweeter sound, render what I have writ- 
ten, contemptible and useless." What is no longer con- 
genial has been superseded. Four of the thirty-six songs 
for children are still widely read in contemporary antho- 
logies of children's verse, and others are occasionally quoted. 

In addition to extensive catechetical exercises in the 
schools, children were subjected to cross-examination at 
home. Such a secular publication as Defoe's Family In- 
structor, which achieved a nineteenth edition in 1809, re- 
flects the pitiless self-analysis indicated in the songs of 
Watts. The dialogue in which Defoe carries on his in- 
struction is divided into three parts : i ) Father and Child ; 
2) Mother and Child; 3) Husband and Wife. It was De- 



CHILDREN S BOOKS "' 

foe's belief that the questions asked are "proper even to a 
child . . the author has tendeavdred to produce the 
question with an air of mere nature, innocence, and child- 
hood and the child's understanding may justly be 
supposed to have proposed them . . . our child asks but 
very little of his father, but what a child of that age may be 
very capable of asking." While catechising the child, De- 
foe has his eye on the sins of the father also, for at one 
point in the dialogue we find an aside to the efifect that here 
the child cries, and the father blushes, o^r at least he ought to 
have done so. Upon the mention of eternal hell fire, con- 
viction works in the child, and it weeps. There ,s the 
pitifully natural plea of the child, "I be'nt big enough yet. 
A typical question put into the mouth of the child is: 
••What will become of me then, father, if I was wicked when 
I was born?" That the language is not altogether level 
with the child's comprehension is clear from the father s 
definition of faith : "And faith, child, is a fiducial, filial con- 
fidence " Defoe's prose has all the gloom, but none of the 
simplicity and occasional charm of Watts's poetry for cliil- 

"^^The inherent interest of mankind in supernatural life 
and the romantic attraction of things outside and beyond 
the experiences of mortal life, were not satisfied in other 
than dissenting circles by theological explanations o a 
personal devil who interfered in the life of man. The ter- 
rible realities of the concrete Calvinistic conceptions, and 
their immediate application to the commonest activities of 
children, precluded an appeal to the imaginative play in- 
terest of children. In fact, one of the chief incentives of 
Watts was the hope that his poems would serve as a sub- 
stitute for secular works that fell into the hands of Dis- 



232 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

senting children. Among men of letters of a different cast, 
the kind of play interest that children find in goblins and 
fairies was condemned as out of harmony with the dictates 
of reason. In the estimation of Buckingham, the light of 
plain reason, which was spread by Hobbes, banished such 
fantastic forms as ghosts ; after Hobbes, men no longer '*in 
dark ignorance lay." And what the classicist poets thought 
of ''Gothic night" as applied to all ages but their own is 
well known. Although it would seem that between the 
dissenters on the one hand and the followers of the en- 
lightenment on the other, the opportunities for a child's 
imaginative escape were slim, nevertheless poets bear wit- 
ness down through the century to the presence of fairies, 
outlaws, witches, and other wonders that appeal to child- 
hood in all ages. While the fashionable literature of the 
metropolis was flourishing in the reign of Anne and the 
first George, a love of Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton 
was growing. The popular ballads were noticed even by 
Addison in the famous comment on Chevy Chase. While 
this literary leaven was at work in high places, the humble 
ballads hawked by chapmen, and the chap books themselves, 
kept alive ancient folk traditions of fairies, witches, and 
ghosts. 

At the cottage fireside and at the nurse's knee, highborn 
and cottage children alike kept continuously in touch with 
the marvelous and supernatural. Age-old tales, "To cheat 
our children with to rest," persisted during the days before 
the brothers Grimm collected them in book form. Even 
the moral Cotton hoped that his didactic pieces would have 
the pulling power of fairy tales : ''like fairy tales to please 
the child." John Gilbert Cooper saw fairies and elves 
capering about the banks of Trent. Young's Epistle to Lord 
Landsdowne exalts Shakespeare at the expense of Corneille. 



children's books 233 

Young thinks of the self-conscious artistry of Corneille after 
every scene, but of Shakespeare only after the fall of the 
curtain, so great is his verisimilitude : 

His witches, fairies, and enchanted isle, 
Bid us no longer at our nurses smile. 

Johnson says that Collins ''loved fairies, genii, giants, and 
monsters ; he delighted to rove through the meanders of 
enchantment." William Erskine's continuation of the Ode 
Oft the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland 
weaves in the popular superstition of changelings. 

Soft o'er the floor the treacherous fairies creep, 

And bear the smiling infant far away ; 

How starts the nurse, when, for her lovely child 

She sees at dawn a gaping idiot stare. 

O snatch the innocent from the demons wild, 

And save the parents fond from fell despair. 

Mackenzie may write of Gothic jargon, but in The Old Maid 
he notices goblins, and his Old Maid depends on her fairy 
tales, which compete with fables, to attract children. 

Tho' ne'er from her embrace had children sprung, 

Yet alien imps with kindness would she greet, 
And oft with pleasure heard the lisping tongue, 

And gave the promised meed of candied sweet ; 
And oft the tale of wonderment she told, 

Of Fayes, that gambled o'er the circly ground. 
And birds, that taught the moral lore of old, 

Then strewed the snowy comfits all around ; 
Thilk would she see them glean with looks of grace. 

And stroked the flaxen pole, and blessed the smiling face ! 

James Grahame in Sabbath Walks notes how 

Children would run to meet him on his way, 
And lead him to a sunny seat, and climb 
His knee, and wonder at his oft-told tales. 

(An Autumn Sabbath Walk) 



234 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Gray's Long Story gives an insight into the lively supersti- 
tions of country folk who suspect "a. wicked imp, they call 
a poet," 

Who prowled the country far and near, 

Bewitched the children of the peasants, 
Dried up the cows, and lamed the deer. 

And sucked the eggs, and killed the pheasants, i 

Even Shenstone, whose countryside is most often peopled 
with nymphs and fauns "or naiad leaning o'er her tinkling 
urn," had attempted the story of St. Kenelm, the boy martyr. 
But the habit of the age is too strong for him, and he soon 
loses the romantic story in long stanzas of moralizing.^ 

Like Thomas Warton, the poets very frequently found 
the "ways of hoar antiquity" not rough and barren, "but 
strewn with flowers" ; and publishers' announcements in- 
dicate a persistent interest in fairy tales. The fairy element 
creeps into the lines of Tickell, Swift, Lyttleton, Akenside, 
and Parnell ; and Gay's portrayal of the quack doctor and 
his mountebanks emphasizes the wide appeal of ballads like 
Children in the Wood. Although Johnson ridiculed bal- 
lads in his Burlesque on the "tender infant" that fell on a 
stone and became a "squealing child," they persisted among 
the common people and grew in popularity with cultivated 
readers. Joseph Mather, a Yorkshire poet, has memorial- 
ized a ballad monger who sang in taverns to advertise his 
wares, and Wordsworth in The Prelude (V, 211) writes of 

1 See Blake's illustration for this passage in William Blake's 
Designs for Gray's Poems (reproduced full-size in monochrome or 
colour from the unique copy belonging to His Grace the Duke of 
Hamilton). — Oxford University Press, 1922. 

2 Delight in fairies is expressed in Mary Lamb's The Fairy: 

If I had such dreams, I would sleep a whole year : 
I would not wish to wake while a fairy was near. 



children's books 235 

ballad tunes, 
Food for the hungry ears of little ones. ^ 

No doubt many children were in the audience at the moun- 
tebank show of Gay's quack doctor, and were deeply moved 
by the singing of Children in the Wood. Gay, who was a 
native of Devonshire, is sufficiently partial to homely ma- 
terial to enlarge on the sentimental effect of this ballad. 
While the doctor was selling his balsams and pills. Jack 
Pudding in his "party-colored jacket" entertained the 
country folk with songs about raree-shows and the feats of 
Punch. 

Then sad he sung the Children in the Wood ; 
Ah ! barbarous uncle, stained with infant blood ! 
How blackberries they plucked in deserts wild, 
And fearless at the glittering falcon smiled : 
The little corpse the robin-red-breasts found, 
And strowed with pious bill the leaves around. 
Ah ! gentle birds ! if this verse last so long. 
Your names shall live for ever in my song. 

(The Shepherd's Week, Saturday) 

The last line indicates that the poet of refinement thought 
he was doing the lowly ballad a service by memorializing 
it to posterity. He could not know the high esteem in which 
ballads were to be held in less than a half century. The 
passage, coming as it does in 17 14, is remarkable for its 
summary of the simple story, and for the poet's frankly ex- 
pressed sympathy. He employs the ballad as more than a 
mere literary device to be passed over in a colorless refer- 
ence. The ballad is recognized as an emotional force in the 
program of the mountebank, and the poet is himself car- 

1 Swift's Baucis and Philemon tells of 

The ballads pasted on the wall. 
Of Joan of France and English Moll, 
Fair Rosamond and Robin Hood, 
The Little Children in the Wood. 



236 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

ried into sympathy by the details. With Lilly-biillero, the 
Irish Trot, the Bower of Rosamond, and Robin Hood, 
Chevy Chase is also sung with its woeful tale of 

Wars to be wept by children yet unborn. 

For the purposes of our study, Gay's Shepherd's Week is 
noteworthy for its emphasis on folk lore. When child- 
hood emerges in poetry, there emerge with it the nurse, 
fairy tales, the schoolmistress and schoolmaster, and other 
accessories. Gay's An Apparition, with its **nurse-invented 
lies," is likewise of interest as showing the persistence of 
humble matter. In it we are told some of the stories 
which '^descend from son to son." Gay can not, of course, 
any more than Shenstone later, escape from the moral im- 
plications and didactic possibilities of such stories. He must 
moralize the efficacy of Children in the Wood in bringing 
offenders to account. In his opinion such ballads have 
been known to arouse the *'fraudful guardian's fright" to 
the extent of compelling him to restore illgot gains. In an 
age that at any rate pretended to shun anything but known 
truths, it was necessary to make the supernatural palatable 
by calling attention to its practical value in the given in- 
stance. 

Children in the Wood was one of the most popular bal- 
lads of the century ; poets referred to it constantly ; and the 
chap books gave both verse and prose forms (The Most 
Lamentable and Deplorable History of the Tnfo Children 
in the Wood), with at least one instance of a variant ob- 
viously based on the ballad : The Distressed Child in the 
Wood; or the Cruel Unkle. ^ Wordsworth notices Chil- 

^ The traditional fairy tale motive of the cruel stepmother is 
noticed in J. Merrick's Ode to Fancy: 

And babes, who owe their shortened date 
To cruel step-dame's ruthless hate. 



children's books 237 

dren in the Wood in The Excursion, ^ but more winningly 
in Redbreast Chasing the Butterfly, where he is shocked at 
the predatory habits of the bird 

That, after their bewildering. 
Covered with leaves the little children, 
So painfully in the wood. 

It was his favorite ballad, and was noticed by him in De- 
scriptive Sketches; he also quoted a stanza in the prefatory 
remarks to Lucy Gray. 

At the cottage fireside in Beattie's The Minstrel (1770- 
1777), when the driving snow had shut the cottagers in, the. 
beldam (^'instructed by tradition hoar") told stories and 
sang ballads while the nut-brown ale went the rounds. She 
told of moonlight revels of the fairies. 

Or hags, that suckle an infernal brood, 
And ply in caves the unutterable trade, 
Midst fiends and spectres, quench the Moon in blood, 
Yell in the midnight storm, or ride the infuriate flood. 

When horror had been raised to the highest pitch in the 
staring and trembling rustics about the fire, the ballad of 
the nut-brown maid was sung to relieve tension. Then she 
told in a gentler strain 

A tale of rural life, a tale of woes. 

The orphan babes and guardian uncle fierce. 

This simple story, above all others, seems to have been told 
con am ore : 

To latest times shall tender souls bemoan 
Those helpless orphan babes by thy fell arts undone. 

Like Gay, Beattie can not refrain from indicating the 
outlines of the story, but he does so with greater realization 
of the child element : 

1 Book VII, 90. 



238 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Behold, with berries smeared, with brambles torn, 
The babes now famished lay them down to die : 
Amidst the howl of darksome woods forlorn, 
Folded in one another's arms they lie ; 
Nor friend nor stranger hears their dying cry. 

This tale was intended especially for the child Edwin, whose 
sense of justice it was meant to stir: 

A stifled smile of stern vindictive joy 
Brightened one moment Edwin's starting tear: 
"But why should gold man's feeble mind decoy, 
And innocence thus die by doom severe ?" 
O Edwin ! while thy heart is yet sincere, 
The assaults of discontent and doubt repel . . . 
Nor be thy generous indignation checked, 
Nor checked the tender tear to Misery given. 

White's Childhood tells how the poet and other children 
begged of the maid the story of the wicked guardian, and 
of how they were moved : 

At each pause we wrung our hands and wept 

Sad was such tale, and wonder much did we 

Such hearts of stone there in the world could be. 

Charles Lamb, who loved sentiment where he found it, 
made use of the ballad in his lines to the incomparable Sid- 
dons. 

Anon the tear 
More gentle starts, to hear the Beldame tell 
Of pretty babes, that loved each other dear. 
Murdered by cruel Uncle's mandate fell. 

Only one other ballad vies with this in popularity, and 
that is Chevy Chase. A favorite phrase is "child unborn," 
as in Mason's // Bellicoso: 

How the child, that's yet unborn. 
May rue Earl Percy's hound and horn. 



children's books 239 

Wordsworth, in lines which do not appear in the Thanks- 
giving Ode (1816) as now printed, recalls how he imbibed 
patriotic sentiments from ballads sung to him in childhood : 

Land of our fathers ! loved by me 
Since the first joys of thinking infancy; 
Loved with a passion since I caught thy praise 
A Listener, at or on some patient knee. 
With an ear fastened to rude ballad lays. 

It was in fact at some nurse's or mother's knee, or with 
the father at the evening fireside, that children heard wonder 
stories and ballads. Thomson's Winter describes a cot- 
tage background that makes clear how at the very time 
when classical restraint in poetry was at the height of fa- 
shion in the metropolis. Gay as a country lad could have 
reveled in an atmosphere of romantic wonder. 

Meantime the village rouses up the fire; 
While well attested, and as well believed, 
Heard solemn, goes the goblin story round, 
Till superstitious horror creeps o'er all. (617-620) 

What Collins writes of the highlands is true also of Eng- 
land : 

E'en yet preserved, how often may'st thou hear, 
Where to the pole the Boreal mountains run, 
Taught by the father, to his listening son. 

Strange lays, whose power had charmed a Spenser's ear. 

Tickell's Prospect of Peace anticipates the romantic fire- 
side motive by incidental homely touches in the lines which 
portray the returned soldier who vividly recalls his war 
experiences. As Tickell is writing in the detached man- 
ner of the classicists, the scene is generalized. He is not, 
like the romanticists, attracted to the fireside material be- 
cause of the twilight mood with which it is readily merged. 
Neither is he interested like the romanticists in the humani- 
tarian aspects of his material. The fond wife hugs her 



240 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

"rough lord" and hangs on his words while he relates 
stories of battlefields. His children smile and tremble in 
turn as he marks feigned trenches in the spilled wine, sets 
the ''inverted fort" before them, and indicates how mines 
whirled whole battalions to the skies. 

The little listening progeny turn pale, 
And beg again to hear the dreadful tale. 

This is a mere glimpse, but underlying the couplet is a bit 
of true observation that, in the desire of the children for a 
repetition of the exciting story, is in harmony with the 
spirit of childhood. 

In A Night Piece, Mickle's winter evening musings car- 
ry him to thoughts of grandsires who by winter firesides are 
relating their youthful adventures with Marlborough's 
armies. These events are remote enough to be narrated 
in the same mood as a ''monkish tale." In this connection 
the poet thinks of recent events that took place during the 
Seven Years' War on the continent. These too will soon 
be traditional matter for a fireside story to be told to 
children. 

And soon the days shall come, 
When Prussia's hinds shall wild adventures tell 
Of Fred'ric and his brothers, such as oft 
The British labourer, by winter's fire, 
Tells to his wondering children, of the feats 
Of Arthur and his knights, and Celtic wars. 

In Vicissitude the cottager is again telling stories before 
his winter fire. While the tempests blow without, he 
cheers the circle with heroic tales and knightly loves of 
former days. 

The long-contented evening sweet he cheers ; 
While from his day-sport on the ice-bound stream. 
Weary returned, with wonder and delight, 
Unrazored youth the various legend hears. 



children's books 241 

Thomas Penrose in the Elegy (leaving the River of 
Plate) on members of the crew lost in the burning of a 
warship, heightens the pathos of his Hnes by alluding to 
the story hour : 

In vain their infants' lisping tongues inquire. 
And wait the story on their father's knee. 

In Lochleven (1766), Bruce, who like Thomson looks 
upon the cottage hearth as the symbol of peaceful con- 
tentment and innocence, links childhood with the story 
group. Gaping swains and children sit cozily before the 
blazing hearth while an aged peasant relates stories of 
other times. Bruce shows a tendency to individualize this 
village chronicler by writing of him in the first person in a 
mood of personal recollection, but the children are still 
generalized as "circling round the fire." ^ 

Mackenzie's Pursuits of Happiness recognizes the close 
ties established between age and childhood during the 
story-hour. 

Where truth sat brooding, like a white-plumed dove. 
O'er infant friendship, and o'er infant love ; 
The fairy tale by simple nurses told. 
And memory rushing in the songs of old. 

Individualization is more closely approached in The In- 
ventory (1786), in which Burns gives intimate glimpses of 
the cottage household in which there are three mischievous 
boys, 

Run deils for ranting an' for noise. 

One is a driver of a team, another a thresher's assistant, 
while 

Wee Davock bauds the nowt in fother. 

1 In Goldsmith's The Traveller, the pilgrim ''With many a tale 
repays the nightly bed." 



242 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Their father reports that he rules them with discretion, al- 
though he must often "labor them completely." Every 
night, and especially on Sunday, he examines them shrewdly 
on the "questions." The poet's unconventional description 
of Davock's recitation of his lessons from memory is con- 
ceived with convincing detail. The little fellow is not a 
lay figure, but a real child. His father has been persistent 
in his nightly quizzing, 

Till, faith ! wee Davock's grown sae gleg, 
Tho' scarcely langer than your leg, 
He'll screed you off "Effectual Calling", 
As fast as ony in the dwalling. 

The cottager's "sonsie, smirking, dear-bought Bess" is less 
fully individualized by the father's remark that the features 
of the "bonie, sweet wee lady" resemble his : 

She stares the daddy in her face. 

In Wilford Churchyard, White expresses a preference 
for burial in village ground, where, unlike in city burial 
places, the dead are respected by shepherds and cottagers. 

I've seen 
The labourer, returning from his toil, 
Here stay his steps, and call his children round, 
And slowly spell the rudely sculptured rhymes, 
And, in his rustic manner, moralise. 

White's thoughts turn in Clifton Grove to the fireside of 
those who are more fortunate than he. As twilight deepens 
into night he can no longer hear the strokes of the wood- 
man who had been busy in the dingle since early morning. 
In the inevitable contrast between wicked city night pleas- 
ures and natural pastoral relaxation, he prefers the simple 
joys of the laborer who now 



children's books 243 

wears the social smile, 
Released from day and its attendant toil, 
And draws his household round their evening fire, 
And tells the oft-told tales that never tire. 

Such ancient tales did not depend solely, however, on 
oral transmission; they were retailed for common people 
in chap books, to which children must have had access di- 
rectly, or indirectly, through the story-hour which would 
adapt to their comprehension what the parent had himself 
enjoyed in the chap books. ^ These diminutive paper-cov- 
ered publications of twenty-four pages no doubt existed be- 
fore 1700, but were at the height of their popularity during 
and after the reign of Queen Anne. They flourished until 
1800, but declined after that date with the advent of penny 
magazines and Chambers's tracts and miscellanies. Most 
of them emanated, in the earlier years of the century, from 
the press of the Diceys in Aldemary Churchyard. They 
were hawked about the country-side by itinerant pedlars 
known as chapmen, who carried the booklets in a bag with 
their needles and notions. Chatterton's Tervono, in Frag- 

^ Cawthorn's The Birth and Education of Genius implies oral 
tradition as well as book material (probably chap books) : 
Time now had rolled, with smooth career, 
Our hero through his seventh year. 
Though in a rustic cottage bred. 
The busy imp had thought and read : 
He knew the adventures, one by one, 
Of Robin Hood and Little John; 
Cou'd sing with spirit, warmth, and grace. 
The woful hunt of Chevy Chace ; 
And how St. George, his fiery nag on, 
Destroyed the vast Egyptian dragon. 
Chief he admired that learned piece. 
Wrote by the fabulist of Greece, 
Where Wisdom speaks in crows and cocks, 
And Cunning sneaks into a fox. 



244 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

ment, at the age of six bartered with "the ragged chapman" 
and won from him "every favourite taw." Children in the 
Lake District of Cumberland no doubt looked forward to 
the seasonal visit of the hawker. Wordsworth wrote in the 
eighth book of The Prelude: 

From far, with basket, slung upon her arm, 

Of hawker's wares — ^books, pictures, combs, and pins — 

Some aged woman finds her way again, 

Year after year a punctual visitant ! ^ 

Among the chap books were stories of edification, 
though these were in the minority. Such is A Timely Warn- 
ning to rash and disobedient Children, Being a strange and 
zvonderfiil relation of a young gentleman in the Parish of 
Stepheny in the snburhs of London, that sold himself to the 
Devil for tzvelve years to have power of being revenged on 
his father and mother, and how his time being expired he 
lay in a sad and deplorable condition to the amazement of 
all spectators. . . . Although chap books are not as a 
rule dated, this one bears the date 1721. Chap books belong 
to prose literature, but often they break into verse, and 
upon occasion are wholly in verse, as, for instance. The 
Children's Example, showing ''How one Mrs. Johnson's 
Child of Barnet was tempted by the Devil to forsake God 
. . . swear, tell lies, and disobey her parents ... re- 
sisted Satan . . . with her dying speeches desiring young 
children not to forsake God, lest Satan should gain power 
over them." Ashton condemns this type as rubbish : 

^ Wordsworth hoped that he might be able to "produce songs, 
poems, and little histories that might circulate among other good 
things in this way. . . . Indeed, some of the poems which I have 
published were composed, not without a hope that at some time 
or other they might answer this purpose." (1808) — Quoted in Lie- 
nemann, op. cit., p. 162. 



children's books 245 

As this child went to school one day- 
Through the churchyard she took her way, 
When lo ! the Devil came and said. 
Where are you going, pretty Maid? 

After some hesitation she answered, 

To school I am going, Sir (said she). 

After further hesitation, which under the circumstances was 
natural enough, she says, 

"In name of Jesus I command !" 

At which the Devil instantly 

In flames of Fire away did fly. 

The edification of these stories was probably willingly en- 
dured for such melodramatic entrances and exits. 

Although such books were bought for children, they 
were probably less interesting to them than the more fasci- 
nating tales of wonder and adventure mentioned in the 
earliest notices of chap books. In 1708 the ''Weekly 
Comedy" (Jan. 22) enumerates Jack and the Giants, The 
King and the' Cobbler, and Toui Thumb. '^ Tn the TatJer, 
Steele speaks through Bickerstaff, who says of his godson, 
aged eight: '*I find he has very much turned his studies, for 
about twelve months past, into the lives and adventures of 
Don Bellianis of Greece, Guy of Warwick, The Seven 
Champions, and other histories of the age. — He would 
tell you the mismanagements of John Hickathrift, find fault 
with the passionate temper of Bevis of Southampton, and 
loved St. George for being Champion of England." There 

1 Tom Thumb and Jack Horner are also, at least in part, 
in verse. 

Jack Horner was a pretty lad 
Near London he did dwell, 
His father's heart he made full glad. 
His mother loved him well. 



246 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

were also stories of the diabolic, such as Dr. Faushis, the 
long speaking title of which must have been irresistible ; of 
superstition, as in the books interpreting dreams and moles ; 
legendary tales like those of Robin Hood and Children in 
the Wood; and historical tales like Fair Rosamond. The 
favorites were, however, romantic tales like Forttmatus, 
Reynard the Fox, Jack and the Giants, Tom Hickathrift, 
and others mentioned by Steele. Criminal stories like that 
of the apprentice George Barnwell (Youth's Warning Piece 
or the Tragicall History of George Barnwell), and biogra- 
phical accounts like those of Robinson Crusoe were equally 
popular, easily taking the edge off the rude couplets of 
a chap book version of Joseph and his Brethren. The eter- 
nal longing of children for romance is faithfully reflected 
in White's To the Genius of Romance, where the poet names 
his favorite stories with bated breath : 

Oh ! thou who, in my early youth, 
When fancy wore the garb of truth, 
Wert wont to win my infant feet. . . . 

White mentions Robin Hood, Sherwood Forest, Greensleeve, 
and Blue-Beard/ 

Such were the delights of the eighteenth-century house- 
hold after the pedlar's pack had been ransacked (^'humbler 
works, the pedlar's pack supplied," Parish Register, Part I). 

These are the Peasant's joy, when placed at ease, 
Half his delighted offspring mount his knees. 

(Parish Register, Part 1.) 

The ''histories" carried children out of their environment 
to ages past. The History of Thomas Hickathrift hardly 

1 See Cowper (Conversation) : 

Guy Earl of Warwick and fair Eleanore, 

Or giant-killing Jack, would please me more. 



children's books 247 

stood in need of advertising catches to commend it to 
children or even to their elders : 

He that does buy this Httle book, 
Observe what you in it do look. 
When you have read it, then may say. 
Your money is not thrown away. 

The opening sentence is characteristic in its ability to 
transport the child into a strange world of adventure: "In 
the reign before William the Conqueror, I have heard in 
ancient history that there dwelt a man in the parish of the 
Isle of Ely, in the county of Cambridge, whose name was 
Thomas Hickathrift," and so on to the end of the romanti- 
cally crammed sentence which is at the same time the 
paragraph. 

In addition to chap books not specifically intended for 
their perusal, children found delight in appropriating stand- 
ard works of literature composed for their elders. With 
no capacity for appreciating irony or satire, child nature 
could nevertheless satisfy its craving for adventure in 
Gulliver s Travels; ^ and with an entire ignorance of Bun- 
yan's allegorical intention, children might yet be fascinated 
by the simple concreteness with which the adventures of 
Christian are set forth. Crusoe's adventures were early 
condensed to the limits of the chap book, but there is at the 
same time evidence that Defoe's account found an early if 
not immediate place in the affections of schoolboys. More 
generous than twentieth-century librarians, those who had 
the supervision of children's reading seem to have prac- 
ticed what Wordsworth stated as an absolute conviction, 
"that children will derive most benefits from books which 
are not unworthy the perusal of persons of any age." This 

1 Wordsworth read and enjoyed Gulliver's Travels at Hawkes- 
head. 



248 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

attitude is in keeping with the shrewd observation attributed 
to Dr. Johnson : "Babies do not want to hear about babies ; 
they hke to be told about giants and castles, and of some- 
what which can stretch and stimulate their little minds." 
In fact, Wordsworth's adventures in the ''slender Abstract" 
of Arabian Nights ( which may well have been a chap book 
version), and in other tales, had in his eyes a moral value. 
In the episode of the drowned man in Esthwaite, Words- 
worth in The Prelude pays tribute to the genii of romance 
for having accustomed his imagination to such scenes as 
took place when the drowned man rose to the surface, with 
the result that the boy was not unnecessarily frightened or 
moved by the gruesome sight near Hawkeshead. The 
"little yellow, canvas-covered book" may have represented a 
truncated form akin to that of the chap books ; at any rate 
the poet was so delighted that he saved his pocket money in 
the hope of buying an unabridged edition of the Arabian 
Nights. The vast growth of interest in Oriental literature 
during the eighteenth century served to open the inex- 
haustible storehouses of Eastern tales to the young roman- 
ticist poet. ^ The deep impression made on Wordsworth is 
revealed in Vaudracour and Julia, where he compares with 
those of Arabian fiction the "wonders that were wrought" 
for the youth in the poem. So attached were romanticist 
poets in their youth to material from the distant past, that 
Russell blames Cervantes for ruthlessly tearing aside the 
veil woven by genius of yore.- 

Cowper's panegyric on his childhood friend Pilgrim has 
already been noticed. Mrs. Piozzi has left on record how 

1 Consult The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth 
Century, by Martha Pike Conant. 

- Don Quixote was one of the books read frequently by chil- 
dren in the first half of the century. 



children's books 249 

Johnson treated Bishop Percy's httle daughter during a 
conversation on the merits of Pilgrim s Progress, which he 
valued highly. He asked her what she thought of the 
book. "The child answered that she had not read it. 'No ! 
then I would not give one farthing for you/ and he set her 
down and took no further notice of her." Long before 
Crabbe noticed "Bunyan's famed pilgrim" on the cottage 
shelf, Frankhn had saved his pennies to buy a copy. 
Southey charmingly recalls childhood hours spent with his 
cousin Margaret in reading Pilgrim's Progress. 

Somerville's Fortune-Hunter bears early witness to the 
popularity of Robinson Crusoe as a boy's book ; it supple- 
mented the stirring tales told by the hero's nurse. His 
imagination had been so excited that 

Whate'er he read or heard of old. 
Whate'er his nurse or Crusoe told, 
Each tragic scene his eyes behold. 

Its value as a boy's book in the schools had evidently been 
recognized in England before Basedow in Germany and 
Rousseau in France or the Edgeworths in England had 
given their pedagogical approval by adopting it. At Man- 
chester Grammar School, Robinson Crusoe was, together 
with Swift's Gulliver, purchased for the Holiday Library 
between 1725 and 1740, and President Samuel Johnson of 
Columbia University included Robinson Crusoe in the un- 
published manuscript list of his readings for the year 1735- 
1736, when he was at the age of nine. When H. K. White 
wrote in one of his letters (1800), "Robinson Crusoe is al- 
lowed to be the best novel for youth in the English lan- 
guage," he probably at the same time gave it the stamp of 
his personal approval as well as reflected the judgment of 
the new pedagogy. Robert Bloomfield's The Farmer s Boy 
has the line 

And strolls the Crusoe of the lonely fields. 



250 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Wordsworth had read the book, for in Enterprise he re- 
marks upon ''the various turns of Crusoe's fate." 

The Hermit, or the imparalleled Sufferings and surprising 
adventures of Philip Quarll, of which Miss Yonge says that 
it "comes to us with the reputation of being by Daniel De- 
foe," and of an edition of which Edwin Pearson has found 
notice as early as 1727, was another of the books appro- 
priated by children. ^ It had reached a twelfth edition in 
1780, and Crabbe noted it among the books on the cottage 
shelf: 

Of Hermit Quarll we read, in island rare, 

Far from mankind and seeming far from care; 

Safe from all want, and sound in every limb. 

(Parish Register, Part I^ 

The edition of 1786 shows the story to be a curious mix- 
ture of the picaresque and the Rousseau love of primitive 
simplicity and vegetative felicity. The first part, especially, 
is in the temper of the return to nature. The second part 
is realistic, and Quarll's matrimonial entanglements — he 
has three wives — seem hardly to offer fit provender for the 
youthful imagination. The third part, written in the spirit 
of Crusoe's experiences on the island, is interspersed with 
interpretations of dreams, prayers of thanksgiving for a 
kind Providence, and a morbid introspective strain and 
analysis of sin that are bound up with vehement denun- 
ciation of worldliness and luxury, and a hatred of all things 
French. The book contains in extended form many of the 
themes of superstition, edification, and romantic adventure, 
together with interest in criminal matters, to be found in 
chap books. Voracious young readers no doubt came upon 
it in such a window bookshelf as Wordsworth describes in 
The Excursion. Wordsworth's and Crabbe's experience 

1 Banbury Chap Books, Edwin Pearson, London, 1890. 



children's books 251 

with borrowed books must have been typical in the decades 
from the seventies to the nineties. Wordsworth remarks in 
Guilt and Sorrow: 

I read, and loved the books in which I read; 

For books in every neighboring house I sought, 

And nothing to my mind a sweeter pleasure brought. ^ 

Although the roots of our highly developed modern in- 
dustry of juvenile book publication are to be found in the 
chap books, John Newberry was the first publisher to set 
up as a producer of books for the amusement of children. 
Combining the functions of a dispenser of drugs and me- 
dicines with those of a publisher of books intended speci- 
fically for children, Newberry flourished at the sign of the 
Bible and Sun in Paul's Churchyard. From the fact that 
Goldsmith and Johnson wrote for him, his activities have 
been especially interesting to students of juvenile literature. 
His ability to advertise his wares in the newspapers gave 
wide circulation to his "Circle of Sciences," and to the little 
volumes which appealed to children. Although he too 
emphasized the moral feature common in children's books, 

1 In the royal household, books were supplemented by stage 
performances of Shakespeare's plays. Mr. J. Buncombe's On the 
Death of Frederick Prince of Wales (1751), which is not as barren 
as most occasional verse of its type, gives an intimate glimpse of the 
young prince at a performance of Romeo and Juliet: 
When late I saw thee drop a tender tear 
Of feeling sympathy on Juliet's bier, 
And heard thy youthful train with sighs confess 
Humane compassion at her feigned distress. 
Poets in general preferred the cottage setting for the story hour. 
Mr. Duncombe's lines are conceived in a different mood : 
No longer now, in Kew's or Cliefden's grove, 
That prattling train shall with thee sportive rove ; 
No more their stories shall thy walks beguile, 
Nor thou repay those stories with a smile. 



252 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

his publications from 1745 onward mark the beginning of 
juvenile publications avowedly designed to furnish amuse- 
ment as well as instruction. 

He improved on the flimsy chap book by introducing the 
cover feature, gilt ornamentation being an added attraction. 
His skilfully worded puffs had strong pulling power in 
homes in which there were children. The following adver- 
tisement appeared in the London Chronicle for Dec. 19 — 
Jan. I, 1765 : 'The Philosophers, PoHticians, Necroman- 
cers, and the learned in every faculty are desired to ob- 
serve that on the first of January, being New Year's day 
(oh, that we all may lead new lives!), Mr. Newberry in- 
tends to publish the following important volumes, bound 
and gilt, and hereby invites all his little friends who are good 
to call for them at the Bible and Sun, in St. Paul's Church- 
yard, but those who are naughty 'to have none." ^ Later in 
the century, the Banbury publisher. Rusher, used rhymes 
to advertise his publications : 

See Jack in his study 
Is writing a book 
As pretty as this is 
In which you may look. 

The price is a penny 
For girls and for boys. 
There's more too at Rusher's, 
And pictures and toys. 

And when with much pleasure 
You've read them all o'er 
Then hasten to Rusher's 
He's printing some more. - 

1 Quoted in Children's Books and Reading, by Montrose J. 
Moses. 

- Quoted by Pearson, op. cit. 



children's books 253 

Newberry's pioneer work is notable because he published 
Goody Two-Shoes and To^mmy Trip in a form accredited to 
Goldsmith, whose name is therefore associated with the 
first attempts to publish juvenile classics.^ Washington 
Irving is severe in his censures when he writes that New- 
berry "coined the brains of authors in the times of their 
exigency, and made them pay dear for the plank put out to 
keep them from drowning." Yet when Sir Joshua Reynolds 
called at Green Arbour Court, where Goldsmith at the top 
of Break Neck Steps and at the end of Turn Again Lane 
wrote for children, he found this couplet : 

By sports like these are all their cares beguiled, 
The sports of children satisfy the child. 

It was in these squalid surroundings that Goldsmith 
probably edited Newberry's children's magazine The Lilli- 
putian. Documentary evidence and receipts in Goldsmith's 
handwriting seem to exist, showing that he wrote abridged 
histories of England and Greece, as well as some abridg- 
ments of Old and New Testament stories, Robinson Cru- 
soe, Pamela, Clarissa Harlozve, and Sir Charles Grandison, 
— all published (by NeWberry. Although it is difficult to 
think of the good-hearted but ponderous Johnson (who was 
accustomed to make little fishes talk like whales) in the 
role of writer or even editor of children's books, it seems 
that there are in the Jupp and the Hugo collections several 
children's books edited and prefaced by him. At any rate 
Johnson and Goldsmith must have discussed the problems 
of writing for young readers, for Boswell recounts how 
Goldsmith expressed the wish that he might be able to make 

1 Consult Charles Welsh's facsimile of the 1766 edition of 
Goody Two-Shoes. See also his A Bookseller of the Last Cen- 
tury, and a good catalogue of Newberry's books for children in 
On Some Books for Children of the Last Century. 



254 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

fishes, animals, and birds talk or appear to talk "for the 
amusement of children." 

The popularity of Newberry's books was greatest be- 
tween 1750 and 1770. After this the growth and popu- 
larity of systems of education for children, and moral tales 
which found a place in such systems of home education, 
tended to crowd out fairy tales and stories of adventure. 
The pure delight in adventure for its own sake was great- 
est throughout the middle decades of the century. The de- 
lightful attitude expressed in Clarissa Harlozue reveals the 
joy of children over such publications as those of New- 
berry, which amused as much as they pedagogued. *T, 
said she, had always, from a girl, a taste for reading, though 
it were but Mother Goose, ^ and concerning fairies (and 

1 Althoiig-h the origin of Mother Goose rhymes and their 
popularity in England need close study before statements can be 
made with accuracy, it seems, according to available evidence, that 
they were of French origin. The designation "Mother Goose" is 
first heard in the seventeenth century, when the contes were first 
pubHshed singly, after which Perrault in 1687 published Histoires 
oil Contes du Terns Passe avec des Moralites, the authorship of 
which he ascribed to his son Perrault Darmancour. The frontis- 
piece pictures an old woman regaling a group of listeners with 
stories, and by her side is a placard on which is lettered : 

CONTES 
DE MA 

MERE 

LOYE 
It seems that a translation of Perrault's contes was published in 
English in 1729 and another in 1745, It must have been one of 
these, or an earlier version, with which Richardson was acquainted. 
Attempts have been made to identify Goldsmith, whose favorite song 
is said to have been "An old woman tossed in a blanket, seventeen 
times as high as the moon", as editor of Newberry's edition, the 
seventh edition of which appeared in 1777. — The Mother Goose 
rhymes suggest an early eighteenth-century origin of the English 
version. 



children's books 255 

then she took genteelly a pinch of snuff) : could but my 
parents have let go as fast as I pulled, I should have been 
a very happy creature." It was fated that fairy tales and 
stories of adventure were to triumph as pabulum for children 
in the nineteenth century; but they suffered a temporary 
eclipse in the moral tales, which, although they were in- 
tended to interest the child, were chiefly designed to instruct. 
Written largely under the stimulus of the new pedago- 
gical activities which resulted from the enthusiasm of Rous- 
seau, the moral tales were nevertheless not representative 
of the fundamentals of his teachings. As to content they 
lean towards Rousseau in the fervid interest shown by these 
amateurs in pedagogy in things as a substitute for mere 
word education. But even this feature probably resulted 
from the native spirit of protest against the classics. Moral 
tales were practical in the sense that they utilized the results 
of the scientific awakening that had carried children as well 
as men into fields and woods rather than into libraries. The 
method, however, was that of the old pedagogy. While 
poets had been condemning exclusive attention to the clas- 
sics and book learning, they had been careful, as is obvious 
especially in Tirocinium, to retain the emphasis on the 
necessity of moral training. The moral tale as exemplified 
in one of its most popular manifestations, in Thomas Day's 
Sandford and Mertoun (1783- 1789), was at bottom noth- 
ing more than a small encyclopedia. ^ Scientific interest in 
the world of natural phenomena supplied most of the subject 
matter, but the intention was religious and humanitarian at 
the same time that the child was crammed with facts. 

1 See also Percival's A Father's Instructions (1775), and the 
works of Mrs. Trimmer, Hannah More, Mrs. Barbauld, and the 
Edgeworths. Sandford and Mertoun is more readable than the aver- 
age moral tale because Day's style was obviously influenced by chap 
books. 



256 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The conception of childhood even in Day and the 
Edgeworths was still expressed in terms of the institutional 
child. The aim was to make the child over, and the result 
was an infant prodigy in place of the natural child who was 
the ideal of Rousseau. Rousseau's endeavor to lose time 
with the child before the age of twelve, finds no recognition 
in the moral tales. Although influenced by Rousseau and 
the new spirit, these writers were, nevertheless, proceeding 
not on the fundamentals of Rousseau (which insisted that 
the child was not a little man) but on the traditional plan 
which treated him as though he had to be made over into 
the likeness of an adult as soon as possible. The moral 
tale was in fact a perversion or misapplication of the theo- 
ries of Rousseau, for its sponsors proceeded with the method 
revealed in the traditional fables which, as Somerville 
noted early in the century, had in the happy plan of Greece 
and Rome "taught the brute to pedagogue the man." Al- 
though writers of moral tales substituted modern material 
for the contents of the ancient fable, they believed with 
Byrom (Ape and the Fox) that 

Old Aesop so famous was certainly right 

In the way that he took to instruct and delight. 

* 

He encouraged, by his fables, the attention of youth, 
And forced even fiction to tell them the truth. 

A didactic purpose is revealed on every page of a neat 
little volume of poems issued by Marshall in a second edi- 
tion in 1789: Poems on Various Subjects for the Amuse- 
ment of Youth. It is bound in half calf and is illustrated 
by attractive oval woodcuts executed by Bewick. The 
poems, which are pervaded by the characteristic humani- 
tarianism of the age, are written at children in a spirit of 
undisguised didacticism. In such a poem as From a Gen- 



children's books 257 

tleman to his San on his Confining a Bird, the intention is 
to shame the child. 'The opening lines with their ad hoini- 
nem attack preclude from the start anything but a superior 
attitude of teaching: 

Horace, what greater punishment. 

Cou'd I inflict, my boy, on thee? 

And tell me what wou'd grieve thee more, 

Than thus to lose thy liberty? 

Yet thou can'st take a savage joy, 
To view thy captive's fond desires; 
Thou can'st with unrelenting heart, 
Behold him beat against his wires. 

The boy is plainly lectured in place of being led to feel a 
community of interest. 

In The Domestic Loss; or the Death of a Dog there is 
profuse sentimental weeping which is itself, however, some- 
what out of keeping with the bald moralizing and philo- 
sophizing that are stretched out to the length of twenty-five 
stanzas. The distinction between child reason and animal 
instinct makes the child talk priggishly in a self-congratu- 
latory vein that recalls Watts. 

If led by instinct's voice alone, 
That instinct gratitude could teach : 
Then blessed with reason to reflect. 
To what perfection should I reach? 

How thankful should my heart o'erflow, 
For mercies that adorn the mind, 
For thought, imagination, speech, 
The privilege of human kind? 

The difiference between Watts in 1720 and these poems in 
1789 is that the subject matter has in the meantime become 
secularized. The approach to the child mind is exactly that 
of the first quarter of the century. The Negro Beggar is 



258 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

likewise written purely to start a young meditation on the 
humanitarian theme. 

What is pity? she asked (as she wiped from her face 
The tear which bestowed an additional grace). 

Other poems like On a Young Gentleman being Desir- 
ous of a Goldfinch, The Drozmied Flies, Young Philemon 
Accused by his Sister of Cruelty, and Verses Occasioned 
by a Young Gentleman's Hiding his Sister's Squirrel, are 
conceived in the spirit of Maria Edgeworth and Mrs. Sher- 
wood, who used the most trivial domestic incidents to point 
an obvious moral. 

Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) 
aimed to "impress devotional feelings as early as possible 
on the infant mind ... by connecting religion with a 
variety of sensible objects, with all that he sees, all he 
hears ... to lay the best foundation for practical devo- 
tion in future life." Although Mrs. Barbauld was influ- 
enced by the scientific awakening — and therefore ought to 
belong to those who teach through direct observation — the 
Preface indicates the conservative source of her inspiration. 
Among the many ''rational" books for children, she finds 
none really suitable "except indeed Dr. Watts's Hymns for 
Children," and "These are in pretty general use." Her 
hymns are intended to be committed to memory and re- 
cited, so that her pupils are in reality not facing "sensible 
objects" but are still dependent on book learning. 

The ingenuity exercised by these writers, including 
Maria Edgeworth, in crowding miscellaneous facts into the 
child mind, while at the same time injecting moral and re- 
ligious instruction, is seen in the omnium gatherum that 
makes up Hymn VHI. In the opening paragraph the cot- 
tage motive together with the return at eve serves the pur- 
pose of inculcating thrift, industry, and affection for parents. 



children's books 259 

"See where stands the cottage of the labourer covered with 
warm thatch. The mother is spinning at the door; the 
young children sport before her on the grass; the elder 
ones learn to labour, and be obedient ; the father worketh to 
provide them food : either he tilleth the ground, or he gath- 
ereth in the corn, or shaketh his ripe apples from the trees. 
His children run to meet him when he cometh home, and 
his wife prepareth the wholesome meal." Without warning 
the child finds himself in an exposition of what constitutes a 
family. Next he is instructed in what constitutes a vil- 
lage, with the closing sentence : "This is a village ; see where 
it stands enclosed in green shade, and the tall spire peeps 
above the trees." Then follows a lesson in geography 
which carries the child from pole to pole. The tropics 
suggest the negro mother and her child "pining in captivity." 
In the concluding rhythms, the Monarch, who rules many 
states (a "hundred states"), is adjured to remember that 
he is responsible to God. 

One phase of her method is well illustrated in Hymn IX, 
where she interests the child in those grains of sand in each 
of which the naturalistic Blake saw a world. She notes 
flowers growing "in the hard stone" of the wall, an obser- 
vation made in a far different mood from that of Tenny- 
son, who connects the riddle of the universe with the flower 
in the crannied wall. Her devotional aims do not succeed 
in crowding out the universal passion for fact cramming, 
which came with the new enthusiasm for a novel world of 
scientific facts, and which must have persisted to the time of 
Dickens, who satirizes the methods of Gradgrind in Hard 
Times. The encyclopedic nature of moral tales and juve- 
nile publications is well illustrated in Mrs. Barbauld's prose 
poetry. The child who can absorb the jumble of botanical, 
zo-ological, astronomical, geographical, and other observa- 
tions, is indeed an infant polyhistor. 



260 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

It is small wonder that Wordsworth condemned fact 
cramming, and that Charles Lamb spoke contemptuously of 
this sort of thing as ''stuff" which had crowded from the 
shelves of booksellers the fairy tales of Newberry. Words- 
worth deplored the lack of imagination in such publica- 
tions, and with justice, as the following passage indicates: 
''Many towns, and a large extent of country, make a king- 
dom ; it is enclosed by mountains ; it is divided by rivers ; it 
is washed by seas ; the inhabitants thereof are countrymen ; 
they speak the same language ; they make war and peace to- 
gether; a king is the ruler thereof. Many kingdoms and 
countries full of people, and islands, and large continents, 
and different climates make up this whole world — God 
governeth it.'' If Wordsworth heard a small child recite 
this from memory, he might well be moved to reproach 
writers of the type, who, however good their intentions, did 
not reverence child nature. 

That these writers were not interested in the child in the 
same sense as Rousseau, is suggested by the fact that Mrs. 
Trimmer and Mrs. Sherwood were the last to bear witness 
in England against fairies. The bold and obvious 
didacticism of later moral tales became even less attractive 
when for the influence of Madame Genlis and Madame d' 
Epinay were substituted the dissection and analysis to which 
the child's mind and soul were subjected in dialogues writ- 
ten for him under the influence of Campe and Salzmann in 
the nineties. Mary Wollstonecraft found in Salzmann's 
Elements of Morality the true method of forming the heart 
and character of the child. In this spirit the minutest and 
most insignificant incidents of family life were moralized, 
with the inevitable moral that prosperity results from order 
and propriety, and punishment and unhappiness from their 
opposites. More attractive than the others is the Calendar 



children's books 261 

of Nature by John Aikin, in the spontaneous bits of illus- 
trative verse; but the fundamental attitude is the same. 
These writers were essentially on the same basis as Isaac 
Watts. At all events they reveal no ability to understand 
and apply the fundamentals of Rousseau as revealed in the 
advice given to the tutor of Madame d'Epinay's son : ''a 
child's character should not be changed ; besides, one could 
not do it if one would, and the greatest success you could 
achieve would be to make a hypocrite of him. . . . No, sir, 
you must make the best of the character nature gave him; 
that is all that is required of you." ^ 

Except for Blake's lyrics, which were not widely known, 
the situation at the close of the century is such as to justify 
not only the protests of Lamb but also the severe condem- 
nation of Wordsworth. The writers of moral tales were 
not true followers of Rousseau. They had all the passion 
for teaching and making the child over which Rousseau 
had condemned. They were influenced by him only in 
externals, and were as didactic as Watts and the classical 
masters. It remained for William Blake, who was influ- 
enced by advanced ideas in philosophy, politics, and theo- 
logy, to give voice to the philosophy of natural goodness 
and universal benevolence in the simple accents of child- 
hood itself. In his lyrics, children themselves for the first 
time in the century take up the motives developed by poets 
during the preceding decades, and speak in their own lan- 
guage, bringing home in their childish accents the pleas for 
universal benevolence and the protests against restraint. 

1 Quoted in Jean Jacques Rousseau by Jules Lemaitre, trans- 
lated by Jeanne Mairet, p. 218. 



CHAPTER VI 
WIIvUAM BLAKE 

The high estimation in which the early poems of Blake 
are held seems all the more deserved when it is realized that 
he wrote his delightful lyrics about children in the very 
years when moral tales in prose and verse were at the 
height of their popularity. Blake's lyrics have a primeval 
freshness that has attracted readers who are not aware 
of the larger body of literature written during the eighteenth 
century for and about children. As a result, his poems 
about children have been singled out as unusual phenomena 
in the days before Wordsworth. To look upon Blake, 
however, as an odd genius, who may have been influenced 
by Elizabethan poetry and Swedenborg and Boehme, but 
who nevertheless is an isolated phenomenon among the 
poets of his generation, is to take a line of thought that 
leads to misunderstanding of the poetry he wrote before 
the tantalizing prophetic books. It is only by frankly 
treating him as a poet who was vitally influenced by the 
thought of his century that his debt to his predecessors in 
poetry, and his original contribution, can be adequately 
measured. If treated in its historical setting, his poetry on 
childhood naturally takes its place among the poetry about 
children in the eighteenth century. His verse clearly re- 
veals the influences which had been at work among poets 
of the century. 

Although valuable records that would throw light on 
the period before the appearance of the prophetic books 
have been destroyed, so that it is impossible to reconstruct 



WILLIAM BLAKE 263 

the earlier period with the same accuracy as the later ones, 
critics unanimously recognize in the earlier publications like 
the Poetical Sketches, Blake's indebtedness to predecessors 
of the "olden age." In place, therefore, of looking only 
to the later prophetic books to explain his Songs of Inno- 
cence and Songs of Experience, which are the only poems 
of Blake that are widely read, it will be more fruitful to 
study them also in relation to the influences which had 
worked upon Blake to produce the poems of the earlier 
period. Before he reached the state of mind revealed in 
the prophetic books, Blake had read widely in English 
literature, and his lyrics about children, begun as early as 
1784,^ disclose his debt to tradition as fully as the poems in 
Poetical Sketches (1783). 

In the Introductimi to the Songs of Innocence he char- 
acteristically tells how he was divinely guided by a child 
sitting on a cloud, who laughingly directed him to pipe 
songs of happy cheer and to write them in a book that all 
may read. He obeyed the call of the child : 

And I wrote my happy songs 
Every child may joy to hear. 

The little book, the poems set in colored engravings made 
and tinted by himself, represents his contribution to the 
long list of books published for children after the middle of 
the century. The format was in keeping with juvenile 
publications of the time, but his engravings added a novel 

1 Compare Songs from an Island in the Moon (MS. circa 
1784) : 

XII O, I say, you, Joe, 
Throw us the ball. 

(Footnote in the Oxford Edition: "Sung by Tilly Lally, a school- 
boy.") 



264 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

feature. It has been observed in the preceding pages how 
poetry for children was increasingly published from the 
days of Watts's Divine Songs for Children until, from the 
time of Newberry's innovations, publishers specialized in 
juvenile literature. Blake was himself in touch with this 
trade. In 1793 he published For Children: The Gates of 
Paradise. Mr. John Sampson says of this publication : 
''In its original form (as pubhshed in 1793) The Gates of 
Paradise was a simple picture-book 'For Children,' con- 
sisting of a frontispiece, title-page, and sixteen engraved 
plates of emblematic designs, the original pencil sketches 
for which are found in the Rossetti MS." ^ In 1790 he 
adapted forty-nine engravings for Mary Wollstonecraft's 
translation of Salzmann's Elementamhuch; and the follow- 
ing year he engraved six plates for her Original Stories for 
Children (1791).- His intimate friend Godwin was in- 
terested in juvenile Hterature, and later set up as a publisher 
of children's books, the Tales from Shakespeare by Charles 
and Mary Lamb issuing from his press. It would, there- 
fore, be no novelty or innovation to publish the Songs of 
Innocence for children.^ To be publishing for children 

1 The Poetical Works of William Blake, Oxford University 
Press, 1914, p. 413. 

2 Compare also "two very sweet designs" for Hayley's "Little 
Tom the Sailor," a series of illustrations for Hayley's "Ballads on 
Animals," and the charming frontispiece for T. Malkin's A Father's 
Memoirs of his Child. 

3 Compare Songs of Experience: A Little Girl Lost — 

Children of the future age, 

Reading this indignant page, 

Know that in a former time. 

Love, szveet Love, was thought a crime! 



WILLIAM BLAKE 265 

was to be, in fact, working in the spirit of his most inti- 
mate friends.^ 

Blake justly prided himself on the delight of children 
of his acquaintance in the tinted engravings of his diminu- 
tive book. The picture which he made a part of each en- 
graving (in itself not larger than five by three inches) 
illustrates and complements the text so as to make each 
page a delight to the eye. In The Little Black Boy, the 
mother is sitting under a tree with the child leaning against 
her. In The Lamb the child is standing just beyond a brook; 
between the child and the barn in the background are sheep ; 
and a lamb is looking into the face of the child, whose arms 
are stretched out as if to receive it into his bosom. ''I am 
happy to find a great majority of fellow-mortals who can 
elucidate my visions, and particularly they have been eluci- 
dated by children, who have taken a greater delight in con- 
templating my pictures than I even hoped." ^ Blake was 
not the first to illustrate juvenile publications, but his deli- 
cately tinted engravings are more attractive than the justly 
admired oval woodcuts of Bewick. 

It is not necessary to read a deep symbolical meaning 
into the vision Which prompted him to write his songs for 
children. Blake's biographers have noted how, as an imagi- 
native child, he had seen a vision at the age of four and 
again at the age of ten; and how to the end of his life he 

1 "So the pen that had once tried to carve, as on a rock, the 
story of Samson, and 'the words of truth, that all who pass may 
read,' was now to become a delicate reed, and write simple sen- 
tences for any child to spell out." — William Blake, Poet and Mystic, 
by P. Berger, translated by Daniel H. Conner. Chapman and Hall, 
London, 1914, page 286. 

2 Letter of Blake to the Rev. Dr. Trusler, August 23, 1799, in 
Letters of Blake, edited by G. B. Russell, Methuen, London, page 63. 



266 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

disturbed his friends by insisting that he saw visions in 
their presence. There need be nothing mysterious or mysti- 
fying in this. He used to say to his friends, "You can see 
what I do if you choose. Work up imagination to the 
state of vision, and the thing is done." In connection with 
his vision of a fold of lambs in a meadow, it is interesting 
to note "the reply which Blake gave to a lady who asked 
him inhere he had descried this sight. ''Here, madam,' he 
replied, touching his forehead : an answer which serves to 
caution us against supposing that he either accepted as 
literal facts for himself, or wished to convey literally to 
others, some of the visionary or supersensuous incidents 
of which he made frequent mention." ^ If the reader will 
come to Blake's lyrics without preoccupations, there need 
be no difficulties in view of his historical position and the 
facts of his life. 

Blake is not the first among poets to use simple lan- 
guage in verses intended for children. From Bishop Ken 
and Watts, through the time of Newberry, to writers of 
moral tales, there were poets and prose writers who had at 
least endeavored to write in language adapted to the com- 
prehension of children, without having in any instance 
achieved the verisimilitude of the lisping syllables of 
Blake's The Little Black Boy. Like Burns, he gains force 
through ballad simplicity; like Burns, too, Blake is often 
homely in his phrasing, it being not uncommon to find collo- 
quial and even ungrammatical expressions.^ Blake's in- 
debtedness to ballads and hymn-writers is obvious. Where, 
however, other writers, including Cowper, were satisfied to 
write from a restricted sectarian point of view, Blake broke 

1 Quoted in Prefatory Memoir by W. M. Rossetti (Aldine 
Blake). 

2 p Berger, op. cit. 



WILLIAM BLAKE 267 

away from t^e limits of creed, and did not retain the views 
and subject-matter that stamped one poem as Unitarian, 
another as Church of England, and still another as Metho- 
dist. V'ariant readings preserved in connecticm with Holy 
Thursday ^ indicate that he was not even tempted to phrase 
a narrow view in place of a broadly human conception. 
Watts thought he had broken with sectarian prejudice in 
his songs for children, but it remained for Blake actually 
to shake off traditional fetters and to look upon the child 
with the eyes of a naturalistic philosopher, as in his Divine 
Image (Songs of Innocence), in which man is conceived as 
the outline of God, so that as every man discovers a real 
man, he discovers God.- 

For Mercy has a human heart, 
Pity a human face, 

And Love, the human form divine. 
And Peace, the human dress. 

How far he is from the insularity of Watts and the bonds of 
creed, is clear in the inclusive closing stanza, which gives 
tender lyric expression to the doctrine of universal benevo- 
lence : 

And all must love the human form, 
In heathen, Turk, or Jew; 
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell 
There God is dwelling too. 

1 Songs of Innocence. 

2 Gardner, Vision and Vesture, p. 6o.— Compare also Auguries 
of Innocence: 

God appears, and God is Light. 

To those poor souls who dwell in Night; 

But does a Human Form display 

To those who dwell in realms of Day. 



268 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Blake represents the culmination of those phases of the 
movement that tended to emphasize childhood in connection 
with the insistence on universal benevolence and freedom 
from institutional restraint. Blake has taken up the mo- 
tives of the childhood theme, and by passing them through 
the fiery alembic of his genius has given them the finality 
of phrasing that, ordinarily, only a master poet can achieve. 
But before a master poet may write, there must be a period 
of preparation. If the reader who wishes to find childhood 
in the poetry of the eighteenth century turns only to Blake, 
it will seem as though Blake had indeed conceived wholly in 
a spirit of originahty, when as a matter of fact he is but the 
natural outcome of forces at work for three quarters of a 
century. In the following paragraphs it is the purpose 
to indicate how Blake grew out of the eighteenth century 
in his attitude tov/ard childhood and how he enriched 
established motives and gave them true lyrical expression. 

In Songs of Innocence (1789) he gives his vision of 
children who are in a perfect state of happiness : in Songs of 
Experience (1794) dind Auguries of Innocence (1801-1803), 
and also in certain lyrics in the Pickering Manuscript, he 
protests against conditions that warp life from its true in- 
tent. Before 1790 Blake still wrote with the heart of a 
child. In Songs of htnocence the child is altogether happy 
because he is in spontaneous harmony with nature. In 
Songs of Experience and Auguries of Innocence, Blake 
recognizes disturbing elements in the realm of nature in 
so far as they affect the child. Like benevolist poets, he 
did not attempt a consistent application of natural goodness 
and universal benevolence, but recognized the intervention 
of facts. Like his predecessors and contemporaries, he pro- 
tested vehemently against conditions and practices which 
he held responsible for unhappiness and suffering. 



WILLIAM BLAKE 269 

With the protest against school restraints put upon the 
child, Blake merges a tender regret which in the mood of 
the universal benevolists he brings home to the reader in 
an image from bird life. With a simplicity that mocks 
analysis, he subtly identifies bird and child. Burns alone 
among those wfho after Thomson pleaded for animals, ap- 
proaches the tenderness and natural magic of Blake. In 
The Schoolboy (Songs of Experience), the child loves to 
rise on a summer morn when birds are singing on every 
tree ; but to go to school and to sit ''under a cruel eye out- 
worn" drives all joy away. 

How can the bird that is born for joy 

Sit in a cage and sing? 

How can a child, when fears annoy, 

But droop his tender wing. 

And forget his youthful spring? 

The difference between Songs of Innocence and Songs 
of Experience is indicated in the engraved frontispieces 
executed by Blake. In that for the first series, young chil- 
dren are standing at their mother's knee; in that for the 
second, the children are older, and are bent in grief over 
the bier of their dead parents. That his conception of a 
happy universe peopled by happy children does not square 
with the facts of daily observation, he holds to be due to 
the distortion of nature by man. Had man been content 
to live in the golden age of innocence, his childlike delight 
in God and creation would not have been perverted, and the 
Songs of Experience would not have been necessary. In 
The Schoolboy, the Child who sits joyless in school, 'Worn 
thro' with the dreary shower," appeals to its parents for 
freedom to live naturally : 



270 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

O ! father and mother, if buds are nipped 
And blossoms blown away, 
And if the tender plants are stripped 
Of their joy in the springing day, 
By sorrow and care's dismay, 

How shall the summer arise in joy, 

Or the summer fruits appear? 

Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy. 

Or bless the mellowing year, 

When blasts of winter appear? 

In Holy Thursday he notes the humanitarian motive in 
relation to children of the poor. Is it a holy thing to see 
in such a rich and fruitful land as England 

Babes reduced to misery, 

Fed with cold and usurous hand? 

Had man not interfered — ^perhaps he was thinking of fields 
and sky blackened with industrial smoke — children might 
still be living, as he had pictured them in Songs of Inno- 
cence, in a happy state of nature. 

For wihere'er the sun does shine, 
And where'er the rain does fall, 
Babe can never hunger there, 
Nor poverty the mind appal. 

In London he again protests against man-made restric- 
tions that bind the child : 

In every Infant's cry of fear, 
In every voice, in every ban. 
The mind-forged manacles I hear. 

In his Revolutionary fervor, Blake has extended Pope's 
objections to school discipline to include restrictions of all 
kinds. As in Rousseau, the child should be free as nature 
made him : man must not interfere. Blake has gone far 



WILLIAM BLAKE 271 

beyond Pope and West in advocating the emancipation of 
childhood. The advanced position of Blake is appreciated 
when his fiery protests are compared with the conservative 
suggestions of Cowper's Tirocinium, in which the child is 
brought nearer to nature by removal from the school to the 
home. The accents of Rousseau are unmistakable only 
once in the poetry of the eighteenth century. Blake alone 
in poetry ventured as far as the French philosopher. At 
times he ventured farther. ^ 

The humanitarian motive noticed by Headley and 
Jerningham is fiercely transmuted by unflinching direct- 
ness of phrasing, which, except for the lyric fire, is sug- 
gestive of Crabbe : 

But most thro' midnight streets I hear 

How the youthful harlot's curse 

Blasts the new-born infant's tear, 

And blights with plagues the marriage hearse. 2 

The war motive is merged with the protest against 
luxury in the ''hapless soldier's sig'h" which "Runs in blood 
down palace walls." The helpless little chimney-sweeper 
cries out against spiritual neglect, which Blake shadows 
forth in the image, ''every black'ning church." In fact, 
London is a summation of most of the themes of protest 
that are found in benevolist poetry. The opening stanza 
gives Blake's version of the romantic antipathy toward city 
life. In the city, all is restraint and repression, and man 
as a result bears the marks of woe. 

1 Gnomic Verses: 

The Angel that presided o'er my birth 

Said 'Little creature, framed of joy and mirth, 

Go, love without the help of anything on earth.' 

2 Compare the MS. variant : "From every dismal street I hear," 
This is nearer Crabbe. 



272 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

I wander thro' each chartered street, 

Near where the chartered Thames does flow. 

And mark in every face I meet 

Marks of weakness, marks of woe. 

The Chimney-Sweeper is important because it reflects 
the benevolist doctrine that man is made for happiness 
in this world and that his happiness should therefore not 
be postponed to a future state. Blake's attitude of antagon- 
ism toward the church as one of the institutions that hinder 
rather than help the child to happiness is clearly revealed 
by the child itself. The humanitarian protest is no longer 
delivered by the poet, but instead he has one of those chil- 
dren who suffer most from social injustice voice the cry 
against neglect of children's welfare: 

A little black thing among the snow, 
Crying 'weep ! 'weep ! in notes of woe ! 
'Where are thy father and mother, say?' — 
They are both gone up to the Church to pray. 

'Because I was happy upon the heath, 
And smiled among the winter's snow, 
They clothed me in the clothes of death, 
And taught me to sing the notes of woe. 

'And because I am happy and dance and sing. 
They think they have done me no injury. 
And are gone to praise God and His Priest and King, 
Who make up a Heaven of our misery.' 

These lines show that Blake was in touch with the most 
advanced opinion of his generation. They reflect the 
opinions voiced in the Revolutionary circles of Godwin 
and Paine. At the dinners given by the publisher Johnson, 
Blake met Mary Wollstonecraft, Priestley, Godwin, Holcroft, 
and Paine ; and he seems to have been the only one of the 
group who dared to expose to the public gaze his extreme 
views on politics, for he actually wore the honnet-rouge 



WILLIAM BLAKE 273 

on the street. It was Blake w*lio later gave Paine the time- 
ly warning which saved his friend from arrest. Blake was 
himself tried for treason at Chichester upon the accusation 
of a soldier whom Blake believed to the end of his life to 
be an agent of the government. To take Blake out of his 
century, and to treat him as an isolated dreamer, is, there- 
fore, to misunderstand him. Blake was a ''daring specula- 
tor in religion and morals ... he was and always con- 
tinued a republican, and an enemy of kings and war." ^ He 
scorned priestcraft with the intensity of Shelley. In The 
Garden of Love the child returns to the green on which he 
had played, and there he finds a chapel he had never ob- 
served before. Over the door was written ''Thou shalt not." 
And when he turned to the garden of love that had always 
blossomed with flowers, he could see nothing but tomb- 
stones, 

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, 
And binding with briars my joys and desires. 

It was contrary to Blake's nature to have the child's natural 
desires fettered and bound. - 

1 William Rossetti, Prefatory Memoir, Aldine Blake (i8qo). 

2 Compare Poems from the Rossetti MS: Why should I care 
for the men of Thames: 

Tho' born on the cheating banks of Thames, 
Tho' his waters bathed my infant limbs, 
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me : 
I was born a slave, but I go to be free ! 

Compare also Langhorne's The Enlargement of the Mind (1763) : 
Is Nature, all benevolent, to blame 
That half her offspring are their mother's shame? 
Did she ordain o'er this fair scene of things 
The cruelty of priests and kings? 

Though worlds lie murdered for their wealth or fame, 
Is Nature, all benevolent, to blame? 



274 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

In A Little Boy Lost he pictures a martyrdom by fire. 
A priest overhears the child giving expression to a natural- 
istic sentiment. The child is voicing the thought that it 
is not possible for an individual to know a greater than 
himself. 

'And, Father, how can I love you 

Or any of my brothers more ? 

I love you like the little bird 

That picks up crumbs around the door.' 

The priest (who in Blake's naturalistic conception represents 
institutional life and restraint from without) was horrified, 
and, while the multitude "admired the priestly care," "led 
him by his little coat" to the altar : 

*Lo ! what a fiend is here,' said he, 
'One who sets reason up for judge 
Of our mos/t holy Mystery.' 

In place of proceeding by way of the cold reasonings of 
his friend Godwin, Blake visualizes the situation in terms of 
childhood. 

The weeping child could not be heard, 
The weeping parents wept in vain ; 
Tihey stripped him to his little shirt. 
And bound him in an iron chain; 

And burned him in a holy place, 
Where many had been burned before : 
The weeping parents wept in vain. 

Blake's fiery spirit of revolt leads him to break in with the 
question, 

Are such things done on Albion's shore? 

Although! Blake frankly notices effects of the cleavage 
which has resulted in nature from man's interference, he is 
not led to disillusionment in the Songs of Experience. He 
states the cause of man's unhappiness, but also suggests the 



WILLIAM BLAKE 275 

remedy. Nature and God are not at fault. In The Little 
Vagabond, the spiritual neglect of the church is arraigned 
in the simple accents of a child who naively observes the 
difference between the bleak ctiurch and the warm and 
inviting alehouse. 

Dear mother, dear mother, the Church is cold, 

But the Ale-house is healthy and pleasant and warm; 

Besides I can tell where I am used well. 

The church had long been out of touch with the masses ; 
by the middle of the century the protests against the tradi- 
tional curriculum in the established schools included among 
the necessary reforms, that of closer touch between priest 
and congregation in intelligible sermons. Boswell notes 
t!hat if the masses are to be reached, it will be necessary 
for the church to adopt some of the enthusiasm of the dis- 
senters. The child in Blake's poem has noticed that parsons 
do not regale people's souls with attractive fare and a 
''pleasant fire." Yet if the church were properly admin- 
istered, all men would be as happy as birds in spring, 

And God, like a father, rejoicing to see 

His children as pleasant and happy as He, 

Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel. 

Blake's remedy is that man should again return to 
nature ; all nature is given him if he will but open his heart. 
In Earth's Answer, Earth, who hears the poet, is "covered 
with gray despair" : man has chained himself with jealousies 
and fears and selfishness ; he is bound by his senses and 
conventions. Earth calls in despair : 

'Break this heavy chain 

That does freeze my bones around. 

Selfish ! vain ! 

Eternal bane ! 

That free love with bondage bound.' 



276 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Blake's "free love" is the spirit of love that permeates 
poetry from Thomson to Wordsworth. But in his protest 
against restraining forces, he was probably also thinking 
more specifically of the Godwinian attitude toward the mar- 
riage bond. ^ The influence of Godwin and Revolutionary 
doctrines did not in this respect go farther than theory with 
Blake, for his married life was not marred by acts unbe- 
coming a husband. In this connection it is interesting to 
note that he has referred in London to the "marriage 
hearse." ^ 

The dynamic force and vivid imagery of Songs of Ex- 
perience reveal Blake's violent energy; and he has pushed 
familiar eighteenth-century doctrines to daring extremes. 
But these qualities of superior genius should not bHnd the 
reader to the identity of his motives with those of his pre- 
decessors. 

In the concentrated force of his epigrammatic protest in 
Auguries of Innocence against restraint and the popular 
desire to make the child over into something which he is 
not by nature, he is more nearly than his contemporaries a 

1 "In some of the earlier 3^ears of the marriage, indeed, it is 
said that grave conflicts of feeling and of will arose between Blake 
and his wife — jealousy on her part being the essential cause, or 
rather something on his part which occasioned her jealousy. This 
will surprise no one who is cognizant of the full range of Blake's 
writings, and who consequently knows, that his views of the 
sexual relation and of the marriage-tie . . . were of the most 
audacious possible kind." — William Rossetti, Prefatory Memoir, 
Aldine Blake (1890), p. xxii. 

2 Cp. Gnomic Verses. 

Remove away that black'ning church, 
Remove away that marriage hearse. 
Remove away that man of blood — 
You'll quite remove the ancient curse. 



WILLIAM BLAKE 277 

true son of Rousseau and the Revolution. His vehement 
denunciations of priestcraft and dogmas that, he held, do 
violence to child nature, often recall his association with 
the Godwinian circle, and suggest also the fury of the free- 
dom-loving Shelley. All other poets who wrote on childhood 
in England before and during the time of Blake, failed to 
understand or at least to apply Rousseau's dictum that 
with the child one should not gain time but lose it, by which 
is meant the policy of non-interference with natural de- 
velopment of children. He demands freedom for the child 
during the years of his development. Because Blake hated 
system as something unnatural, he would not be in sympathy 
with a system of education like that of Madame Genlis or 
Sarah Trimmer. Teaching of all kinds, by which he means 
interference from without by adults, is condemned. He is 
one with Rousseau in recognizing that the adult has his 
place, but he insists that the child has his inviolable place 
also: 

He who respects the infant's faith 
Triumphs over Hell and Death. 
The child's toys and the old man's reasons 
Are the fruits of the two seasons. 

The emmet's inch and the eagle's mile put all philosophy of 
grown-ups to shame. He who teaches the child sophisti- 
cated lore "the rotting grave will ne'er get out" ; and 

The babe that weeps the rod beneath 
Writes revenge in realms of death, 

for man must recognize that children have a spiritual na- 
ture, and that the child, therefore, is "more than swaddling- 
bands." Because of man's interference, children are born 
only "to night," which is Blake's way of saying that they 
are system-bound and lacking in spiritual insight. If man 



278 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

would not interpose his schemes, children would be born 
only to happiness/ 

He senses eternity in the soul life of the child just as 
clearly as he sees a world in a grain of sand — all nature is 
linked, and every iBanifestation of nature demands the 
reverence of man in its own kind. In this respect Blake 
had a keen vision that was not vouchsafed to writers of 
moral tales, who were not willing to take the child for 
what God had made him. Them and all their tribe he con- 
demns outright as unable to comprehend child nature ; their 
efforts are — and here again he is in harmony with Shaftes- 
bury and Rousseau — a mockery of God's creation : 

He who mocks the infant's faith 
Shall be mocked in Age and Death. 

In Auguries of Innocence, Blake has interwoven with 
the traditional protest against restraint a true understand- 
ing and respect for the faculties of children. In so far as 
he has advanced from negative protest to a positive vision, 
he is one of those who, beginning with the liberalizing 
Shaftesbury, lead to Herbart in pedagogy and Stevenson 
and Field in poetry. They left far behind them the traditional 
didactic spirit and looked upon the child with a feeling 
heart and clear understanding that were, as in Blake, in- 
spired by respect and reverence for child nature. 

In Auguries of Innocence Blake delivers his message 
in the mood of the benevolists. References to animal life 
clarify and enforce the thought of almost every epigram. 
The Thomsonian plea for freedom is condensed by Blake 
into the awe-inspiring lines: 

1 Every morn and every night 
Some are born to sweet delight. 
Some are born to sweet delight, 
Some are born to endless night 



WILLIAM BLAKE 



279 



A robin redbreast in a cage 

Puts all heaven in a rage. 

A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons 

Shudders Hell thro' all its regions. ^ 

Humanitarian and charitable motives are treated through- 
out in the same mood, and always with a terrible intensity 
and "double vision." 

Each outcry of the hunted hare 
A fibre from the brain does tear. 
A skylark wounded in the wing, 
A cherubim does cease to sing. 

* 

The bat that flits at close of eve 
Has left the brain that won't believe. 
The owl that calls upon the night 
Speaks the unbeliever's fright. 
He who shall hurt the little wren 
Shall never be beloved by men. 

The wanton boy that kills the fly 
Shall feel the spider's enmity. 
He who torments the chafer's sprite 
Weaves a bower in endless night. 
The caterpillar on the leaf 
Repeats to thee thy mother's grief. 

The inability of writers of moral tales to take the child 
frankly as a child, and to reverence him without interposing 
conceptions foreign to child nature, is illustrated in Poems 
on Various Subjects for the Amusement of Youth, the 
second edition of which was published in the same year 
as Songs of Innocence. The volume is pervaded by the 
conventional humanitarianism of the age. The poems lack 
the spirit of Blake's lyrics because they were written at 

1 Cp. Thomson's lines on confined and caged birds in Spring. 



280 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

children in a spirit of bald didacticism. ^ Children are 
plainly lectured instead of being led to feel the situation. 
Blake, on the other hand, in place of acknowledging a line 
of demarcation between the child and the natural phenome- 
na of animal life, identifies the child spirit with that of the 
animal by a perception of the underlying unity that binds 
all creation. The child and animal are equally conceived 
with an objectivity that for^bids the recognition of a line of 
cleavage between created beings. 

Blake accepts this mystic unity as a fact, and does not 
interpose deductions and implications that, because they are 
the result of mature thought based on reading and exper- 
ience, can not be in harmony with the child's thoughts on 
the subject. The pot-boilers of Charles and Mary Lamb 
(however delightful as compared with the moral tales and 
their congeners) and the poems of Ann and Jane Taylor 
fail in the authors' inability to enter truly into the child 
spirit. The poetry of the Taylors, delicate as the verse 
often is, as in The Violet, and Thank You, Pretty Cow, and 
attractive as in Tzmnkle. tzmnkle little star, nevertheless 
suffers because they do not interpret the impressions of a 

1 Nathaniel Cotton turned to childhood in Happiness: 
Go to the schoolboy, he shall preach 
What twenty winters cannot teach. 

His didactic purpose is clear in Slander: 

Childhood and youth engage my pen, 
Tis labor lost to talk to men. 

In his winning lines To Some Children Listening to a Lark ("See 
the lark prunes his active wings"), he asks, 

Shall birds instructive lessons teach, 
And we be deaf to what they preach ? 

No ; ye dear nestlings of my heart ! 
Go act the wiser songster's part. 



WILLIAM BLAKE 281 

child in terms of child thought and comprehension. *'So 
far were they ruled by the customary requirement of their 
time, that they falsely endowed the juvenile mind with the 
power of correlating external beauty with its own virtuous 
possibilities." ^ Children from whom the sentiments of 
these poems are supposed to flow, reveal an unnatural 
power of discrimination that is not childlike. The quick 
response that Blake's Songs of Innocence still evoke from 
children, who normally consider all animals and flowers 
their friends, is, again, due to the poet's ability and willing- 
ness to take the emotional and thought life of the child for 
what it is, and to reverence it. Blake becomes again a child, 
writing as a child would if he had the power of poetic ex- 
pression. 

This intimate unity of created beings is expressed almost 
exclusively by merging the animal motive with the child- 
hood theme. By bringing these two elements together in 
the development of universal benevolence, Thomson had 
started the tradition which led not only to Burns's natural 
magic in developing childhood themes in imagery drawn 
from bird life, but also to Lovibond's exaltation of the child 
in Rural Sports. Blake is the recipient of the same in- 
fluences, and it is only by understanding the attitude of 
poets during the eighteenth century toward animals that 
Blake's lyrics can be read in true perspective. Animals 
are at the very center of his conception of life as expressed 
in his development of the childhood theme. Lovibond had 
already definitely held up the child as a model for parents; 
and Blake's fundamentally naturalistic conception in Songs 
of Innocence is in hamiony with that part of Christianity 
which exalts the innocence and purity of the child heart : 

1 Children's Books and Reading, by Montrose J. Moses, New 
York, 1907. 



282 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set 
him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say 
unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as 
little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom 
of Heaven, 

In Blake's conception, children are in complete harmony 
with the spirit of benevolence that permeates the universe. 
Where in Songs of Experience and Auguries of Innocence 
he protests against man's sense-bound attitude, in the pure 
conception of Songs of Innocence he depicts childhood as it 
has never been portrayed again in English literature. 
Children enjoy the natural, unquestioning happiness of 
which man might partake if he could live like them in 
conformity with nature. The ideal state of happiness in 
which Bllake's children live and move spontaneously, dif- 
ferentiates his poems from those of other poets. His im- 
ages embody the dream of the eighteenth century ; his ani- 
mals and children illustrate the vision of natural goodness 
and universal benevolence. Blake's children and the ani- 
mals with which they live in community of feeling and in- 
terests are not those of this world. On the other hand, 
Dora Quillinan's pet lamb is an animal of the pastures that 
every Lancashire peasant knows. Fidelity tells of a hound 
of terrestrial breed ; and one always thinks of the poem in 
connection with Sir Walter Scott's Helvellyn. Cowper's 
hare and Burns's mouse are sentimentalized, but they are 
nevertheless of the type known from experience. In the 
eighteenth century there is a whole catalogue of freakish 
beasts, from Shenstone's playful kid that gamboled on the 
roof of the garden house, to Lovibond's farm-yard gather- 
ing, Cowper's Old Tiny, and Wordsworth's kitten toying 
with the falling leaves : all are conceived in terms of com- 
mon experience. But Blake's children at play with animals 



WILLIAM BLAKE 283 

represent an ideal state that would exist if natural goodness 
and instinctive benevolence were facts. 

If his songs have an Elizabethan freshness, it is because 
Blake had like the Elizabethans an eager, childlike enthu- 
siasm that was inspired at the same time by the highest 
Christian teachings and naturalistic philosophy with regard 
to the child. If his ballad-like simplicity has greater charm 
than the halting verse of minor eighteenth-century poets, 
it means simply that he, like Burns, added lyric power. 
His lyrics are joyous as the theme he develops, because he 
sang with an Elizabethan spontaneity in the true spirit of 
ballad simplicity. The Echoing Green is of the eighteenth 
century in all but the joyous freshness of the exhilarating 
lines that sing themselves. The spontaneous quality of the 
poem must not obscure the fact that the side glance to bird 
life is not new, and that children sporting on the green 
have been observed often by poets before Blake. 

The Sun does arise, 

And make happy the skies; 

The merry bells ring 

To welcome the Spring; 

The skylark and thrush, 

The birds of the bush, 

Sing louder around 

To the bells' cheerful sound, 

While our sports shall be seen 

On the Echoing Green. 

The image of old folk sitting in the shade and recalling the 
days of their youth is not new. 

Old John, with white hair, 
Does laugh away care, 
Sitting under the oak, 
Among the old folk. 
They laugh at our play. 
And soon they all say: 



284 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

"Such, such were the joys 
When we all, girls and boys, 
In youth time were seen 
On the Echoing Green." 

The image at the heart of the closing stanza, that of the 
mother bird and her brood, is not novel. 

Till the little ones, weary. 
No more can be merry; 
The sun does descend, 
And our sports have an end. 
Round the laps of their mothers 
Many sisters and brothers, 
Like birds in their nest, 
Are ready for rest. 
And sport no more seen 
On the darkening Green. 

The unaffected abandon to the child spirit is new. The 
play of children is that of natural children, and not sicklied 
over, as in Gray, by thought or sentiment, for Blake identi- 
fies himself with children and writes as from the heart of a 
child. 

In The Lamb, he has again written wholly from the 
point of view of the child who asks the little lamb if it knows 
its maker. 

Little Lamb, who made thee? 
Dost thou know who made thee? 

The imagery is simple and convincing because it is con- 
ceived in the child spirit. lA child's observation would focus 
on the "Softest clothing, woolly, bright," and on the "tender 
voice" of the lamb. |In the second stanza the child answers 
the question with equal simplicity, but with a mystic insight 
into the unity which makes lamb and child one, an ob- 
servation that is at the same time profound, and yet char- 



WILLIAM BLAKE 285 

acterized by just that simple penetrative power, unspoiled 
by experience, that is associated with childhood. 

Little Lamb, Fll tell thee, 
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee : 
He is called by thy name, 
For He calls Himself a Lamb. 
He is meek, and He is mild ; 
He became a little child. 
I a child, and thou a lamb. 
We are called by His name. 

Blake does not conceive the child as reasoning out the prob- 
lem ; that would have led nowhere, and, anyway, would not 
have been true to child nature. ^ The child feels the unity, 
and states it like a child as a fact, directly and unquestion- 
ingly. It is here that Blake breaks with the didactic tra- 
dition. He does not reason, and he does not teach ; instead 
he sings eternal mystic truths in the lightsome mood of 
childhood, before doubt has awakened the mind to make it 
gloomy. Childhood was sacred in the eyes of Blake be- 
cause of this power, which is lost in man. 

In Night, the child's thought is wholly absorbed in im- 
ages from animal life. He is not thought of according to 
one standard, and birds according to another. He unques- 
tioningly accepts his life as guarded by the same benevo- 
lent spirit which protects bird and beast. So delicately 
is the child attuned to this spirit that in A Dream an 

1 Auguries of Innocence: 

The questioner, who sits so sly, 
Shall never know how to reply. 
* 

The emmet's inch and eagle's mile 
Make lame Philosophy to smile. 
He who doubts from what he sees 
Will ne'er believe, do what you please. 



286 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

emmet which has lost its way casts a shadow over the 
*'angel-guarded bed" of a child asleep on the grass. In a 
dream the child heard the benighted and travel-worn em- 
met say: 

'O, my children! do they cry? 

Do they hear their father sigh? 

Now they look abroad to see : 

Now return and weep for me.' 

The child pitied the emmet, and ^'dropped a tear." But he 
was relieved to see a glow-worm, who replied to the emmet, 

'What wailing wight 
Calls the watchman of the night?' 

This is all delightful. The story has a happy ending, for the 
glow-worm sets the emmet on the track of the beetle. 

Any child would joy to hear his mother read this drama- 
tized episode from the night life of famihar insects. The 
animals act their part with simple dignity and restraint that 
does not obscure their kindliness of heart. Sensitive na- 
tures had responded in the eighteenth century to the appeal 
for a consideration of the rights of animals ; but Blake's 
vivid imagination carried him beyond their indignant re- 
proaches and sentimental pleas into a vital dramatization of 
animal life in terms of the humanitarian spirit that had 
begun to pervade all classes of English people fifty years 
before the emmet and glow-worm conversed in the grass 
near a sleeping child. In the sentiment of the poem, and in 
the ballad form which harmonizes perfectly with the child 
spirit, Blake is in the direct line of Romantic development 
that led to the simple ballad of the naturalistic cottage girl 
whose inability to comprehend the sophisticated poet's in- 
sistence on the difference between life and death emphasizes 
the indestructible unity that underlies all creation. 



WILLIAM BLAKE 287 

There is a touch of whimsicaHty in A Dream which 
foreshadows definitely, for the first time in the eighteenth 
century, the attitude of Stevenson and Eugene Field. 
Children spontaneously rise with true feeling to the con- 
ception of the emmet who has lost his way in the dark and 
can not find his children. It is inconceivable that Watts 
or the ultra-serious Barbauld and Trimmer should have 
thought in terms of the glow-worm who asks what wailing 
wight calls the watchman, or still less of the injunction, 
which suggests the whimsical mood of Wynken, Blynken, 
and Nod , 

1 am set to light the ground, 
Wihile the beetle goes his round: 
Follow now the beetle's hum; 
Little wanderer, hie thee home.' 

In this poem there is not so much as a suggestion of teach- 
ing; in fact, the child is not made to feel conscious of him- 
self at all ; his sentiment is merged with a situation that 
is perfectly normal to his conception of what may happen 
in natural life. A new force is felt here in children's 
poetry. It is the unaffected and untrammeled working of 
the poet's fancy. Where the imaginative approach would 
be too strong for the child's comprehension, the fancy of 
the poet, working in harmony with the child's mind pro- 
cesses, conceives a situation that appeals immediately be- 
cause of its delicacy. 

On Another's Sorrozv shows a child who again bears wit- 
ness to an instinctive universal benevolence that had been 
preached without Blake's fire by poets as far back as Thom- 
son. Blake's child can not conceive of a state in which he 
could "see a falling tear" and not ''seek for kind relief." 
The child interprets this benevolent spirit first in terms of 
the domestic life with which he is familiar, and then in 
terms of bird life. 



288 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Can a father see his child 
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled? 
Can a mother sit and hear 
An infant groan, an infant fear? 
* 

And can He who smiles on all 
Hear the wren with sorrows small, 
Hear the small bird's grief and care, 
Hear the woes the infants bear, 

And not sit beside the nest, 
Pouring pity in their breast; 
And not sit the cradle near. 
Weeping tear on infant's tear; 

He doth give His joy to all; 
He becomes an infant small. 

Here the conception is closer to Christianity, and there is 
also a faint suggestion of teaching the child, although the 
child is speaking. 

In Songs of Innocence the opposites of those poems 
which treat the same subjects in a mood of protest in Songs 
of Experience are pervaded by the spirit of benevolence. 
In these the poet is closer to the outward events of life. 
Holy Thursday is one of the group which reflect actual ex- 
perience, or at least approach it. It is connected with that 
century-old institution, the annual charity sermon, which 
was preached on a stated day, and which charity children 
attended in a body. They were garbed in the distinctive 
dress of their schools, each group distinguished by a certain 
color. ^ Holy Thursday is one of the earliest of the group, 
the first draft being included in the manuscript known as 

1 Compare the dress of Lamb and Coleridge while pupils at 
Christ's Hospital. 



WILLIAM BLAKE 289 

An Island in the Moon} The background associates the 
poem with St. Paul's in London. Blake has developed the 
charity motive more vividly than Thomson, who had also 
noticed the happy songs of institutional children. Blake 
pleads with men not to look unsympathetically upon this 
throng of innocent children, and has enriched the poem by 
images from nature. The deep love and humanity which 
pervade the poignant lines in The Little Black Boy are here 
also appealingly phrased in connection with the multitudes 
of children who enter St. Paul's. 

'Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean, 
The children walking two and two, in red and blue and green, 
Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow, 
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames' waters flow. 

O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town! 
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own. 
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs, 
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands. 

Now like a mighty wind they raise to Heaven the voice of song, 
Or Hke harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven among. 
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor; 
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door. 

The poem reveals Blake's ability to take a subject from 
common life and to depict it in lines that are definite and 
concrete. He has localized his subject and given it firmer 
outlines than can be found in the most typical Songs of 
Innocence. In this near approach to physical reality he 
has not refrained from applying the moral in the last line. 
The sorrows of the little chimney-sweepers are con- 
ceived sentimentally by depicting the pathetic joy which the 
misused creatures draw from a mere dream. It is not ac- 

1 Mr. John Sampson, op. cit., page liv : "1784 circa, Writes An 
Island in the Moon, containing earliest of Songs of Innocence." 



290 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

cidental that Blake was drawn to these children of soot 
and smoke. It is an historical fact that these boys often 
had a fire lighted under them to force them to climb into a 
chimney which they feared.^ Blake does not intrude 
sophisticated notions of grown-ups, except possibly in 
the last line, but allows the child, in his own simple lan- 
guage, to arouse humanitarian sympathy without a direct 
appeal for it. Like Southey fifteen years later in The Battle 
of Blenheim, Blake has written in the main with artistic de- 
tachment and objectivity that make a powerful appeal be- 
cause the terrible conditions which worked injustice on help- 
less children are imaginatively realized. His phrasing of 
the pathetic ray of hope for happiness in their work is more 
convincing than many lines of moralizing or preachment. 

When my mother died I was very young, 
And my father sold me wihile yet my tongue 
Could scarcely cry " 'weep ! 'weep ! 'weep ! 'weep !" 
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep. 

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head, 
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved : so I said 
"Hush, Tom ! never mind it, for when your head's bare 
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair." 

And so he was quiet, and that very night, 

As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight! — 

That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack, 

Were all of them locked up in coffins of black. 

And by came an Angel who had a bright key, 
And he opened the coffins and set them all free; 
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run. 
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun. 

^ "drove him up the chimney with blows, pin proddings, and 
even with the lighting of a fire beneath his feet." O. Jocelyn Dun- 
lop: English Apprenticeship and Child Labour, p. 271, 1912, London, 



WILLIAM BLAKE 291 

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind, 
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind ; 
And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, 
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy. 

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark, 
And got with our bags and our brushes to work. 
The' the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm; 
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm. 

In Songs of Experience and Auguries of Innocence, 
Blake is in the direct line of development from Shaftesbury 
and Thomson, and, moreover, shows the more daring phras- 
ings of the Revolutionary period in which he lived. Except 
for the group of poems in which he is close to grimly real 
suffering and misfortune that are developed in their hu- 
manitarian aspects, so that he is tempted like the moral 
writers to suggest a moral for the benefit of children, Songs 
of Innocence reveals the purest form of the poets' dream of 
a happy state of childhood. More successfully than other 
poets of the century he has refrained from moralizing 
childhood. 

After all, the true secret of Blake's success lies in his 
reverence for childhood in all its manifestations. ^ He did 
not kneel before it in the same sense as Wordsworth, who 
deified the child by imaginatively exalting it in the Ode. 
Neither did Blake look upon the child in the spirit of 
Eugene Field's Little Boy Blue, where the parents behold 
in the rusty tin soldiers, standing in the array in which their 
child left them, an altar at which to worship the mystery 

1 Langhorne's Enlargement of the Mind (Epistle II, 1765) 
answers the question. 

But why should life, so short by Heaven ordained, 
Be long to thoughtless infancy restrained . . . ? 
* 

O blind to truth ! to Nature's wisdom blind ! 



292 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

of life. With Blake it is the frank acceptance and faithful 
realization of the child's sense of wonder and mystery, in 
such poems as The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl 
Found (Songs of Experience), that causes children to rec- 
ognize in their elders a community of feeling which breeds 
a quick response because of equality and identity of interest. 
Blake's child spirit is revealed better than anywhere else in 
that mystical sense which in less simple and human form 
dominated and motivated his later work not connected with 
childhood. His elemental frankness and true ballad ob- 
jectivity made it possible for him to feel and write like one 
of his poetic children. The sentiment of Blake never be- 
comes sentimental or forced, for the reason that it is char- 
acterized by true simplicity of child sentiment. Like the 
nurse in Nurse's Song, he is one of the group. There is 
no herding into the fold as in Dorothy Wordsworth's poem ; 
instead it is "let us away." The children answer, 

"No, no, let us play, for it is yet day, 
And we cannot go to sleep ; 
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly, 
And the hills are all covered with sheep." 

Then follows a spontaneous acquiescence, for children must 
not be thwarted in their natural desires : 

"Well, well, go and play till the light fades away, 
And then go home to bed." 

The little ones leaped and shouted and laughed 
And all the hills echoed. 

At last, then, in spite of tradition that would place fet- 
ters on children, in place of brimstone-and-fire threats, and 
in the face of moral strictures and forbiddings, the child is 
free and can sing in the Laughing Song, 



WILLIAM BLAKE 293 

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, 
And the dimphng stream runs laughing by; 
When the air does laugh with our merry wit, 
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it; 

When the meadows laugh with lively green, 

And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene. 

When Mary and Susan and Emily 

With their sweet round mouths sing, "Ha, Ha, He !" 

When painted birds laugh in the shade, 

When our table with cherries and nuts is spread, 

Come live, and be merry, and join with me. 

To sing the sweet chorus of "Ha, Ha, He !" 

Blake's achievement of placing the child on a plane where 
his desires and impulses are recognized as facts to be un- 
hesitatingly accepted in place of being repressed or made 
over into something else, entitles him to the position of 
pioneer poet in the modern sense of poetry about children, 
where the ideal is that oneness with nature is the "glory 
of Childhood". 

The Christian terminology which Blake took over in 
his poems is not out of harmony with his essentially natural- 
istic conception of childhood. Unless he had coined an en- 
tirely new vocabulary, which would have militated against 
clearness, as it does where he has invented fantastic phrases 
in his later poems, ^ he could not well avoid using such terms 
as "Shepherd," "Lamb," "God," "Angel," "Heaven," 
"Father," "Maker," which were ready at hand, but to which 
he did not always attach the traditional theological concep- 
tions. Blake's children speak of their maker as of a friend. 
There is no suggestion in the child lyrics of an external 
God ; they are not conscious of an anthropomorphic, absolute 

1 Compare "Oothoon," "Golgonooza," "Bowlahoola," "Ololon." 



294 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

monarch who rules heaven and earth as in the Miltonic 
conception ; there is no supernatural being whom they must 
fear as in the economy of Watts. When Blake's intention 
is most evident, as in The Shepherd, the child interprets his 
observations without being disturbed by the thought of 
anything but the shepherd in the fields with his ewes and 
lambs. In The Lamb the child in the same mood spon- 
taneously identifies himself with animals, who are 
then at once identified with God, Far from being blas- 
phemy, this is in the naturalistic conception the highest com- 
pliment the child is capable of paying its maker. The sense 
of fellowship, and the untutored acceptance of God as one of 
its own kind, which are expressed in all of the child's songs 
with unaffected naturalness that suggests no outside inter- 
ference, are signs of inborn reverence. According to the 
naturalistic view, the greatest token of respect is the child's 
acceptance of its elders as equals. 

In The Voice of the Devil, Blake outHnes his conviction 
that all bibles and sacred codes have been the cause of the 
erroneous belief that man has *'two real existing principles, 
viz., a Body and a Soul," and that ''Energy, called Evil, is 
alone from the Body," and that "God will torment Man in 
Eternity for following his Energies." Blake holds the 
following contraries to be true ; "that man has no Body 
distinct from his Soul ; for that called Body is a portion of 
Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul," 
and that "Energy is the only life, and is from the Body 
. . . Energy is Eternal Delight." There is nothing 
devilish, therefore, in following natural energy and desire. 
Blake condemns Milton, for instance, for fettering his 
angels and giving liberty of action to devils. The truer 
conception would have been, in his estimation, to recognize 



WILLIAM BLAKE 295 

natural desire, which can be restrained and made passive 
only in those who are weak enough to be restrained ; but to 
be weak is to be without energy; that is, without life. 
When Blake wished to reawaken men to his belief, he held 
up the child. Although he recognizes the disturbing in- 
fluence of man in Songs of Experience, he had written into 
the Songs of Innocence his vision of the unrestrained phy- 
sical delight of innocent children, who manifest a soul life 
unspoiled and not made self-conscious by institutional inter- 
ference. ^ 

Blake's historical position near the close of a develop- 
ment that had taken place for nearly three quarters of a 
century made it possible for his exuberant spirit to find a 
positive outlet after the ground had been cleared by poets 
during the decades before 1789. In place of talking about 
the child or to it, Blake is at one with the child. "Blake 
carried himself back into the days of childhood, when all 
was joy and innocence, and when the new-born soul felt 
no other emotions but life and the joy of living." - If man 

1 Compare Motto to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience: 

The Good are attracted by men's perceptions, 
And think not for themselves ; 
Till Experience teaches them to catch 
And to cage the fairies and elves. 

{Rossetti MS.) 

Compare also Infant Sorrow: 

I beheld the Priest by day, 
Where beneath my vines he lay. 
Like a serpent in the day 
Underneath my vines he lay. 

{Rossetti MS.) 

2 William Blake, Poet and Mystic, by P. Berger, translated by 
Daniel H. Conner, Chapman and Hall, London, 1914, p. 286. 



296 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

would but be natural, his happiness would be as unques- 
tioning as that of the child in Infant Joy: 

"I have no name: 

I am but two days old." 

What shall I call thee? 

"I happy am, 

Joy is my name." 

Sweet joy befall thee! 

Pretty Joy! 

Sweet Joy, but two days old. 

Sweet Joy I call thee : 

Thou dost smile, 

I sing the while, 

Sweet joy befall thee ! 

This is pagan in its headlong abandon to the joy of 
living. For the ideal of the institutional child the poet has 
substituted the naturalistic delights of a child who in na- 
tural goodness has inherited happiness because he is living 
unquestioningly in harmony with the spirit of love that 
would visibly pervade the world if man did not interfere. 
Blake had the fullest vision of universal benevolence that 
wishes happiness for all men; but to be happy they must 
be again like children — innocent, gladsome, and acknow- 
ledge no restraint from without. 

Professor Irving Babbitt may inveigh against the evils 
which he sees growing out of such a naturalistic abandon 
to the god Whirl as Blake has reflected in Infant Joy, 
Laughing Song, and Spring. However, those forces of 
benevolence which had been at work since Shaftesbury, 
and which had gradually modified the attitude of poets 
toward children, reached in Blake's Songs of Innocence 
their highest literary expression in the exaltation of mani- 



WILLIAM BLAKE 297 

festations of instinctive goodness and universal benevolence 
which recognize fellowship with animals. In his protest 
against what he considered unjust outside control, from 
which children had for ages suffered at the hands of man, 
Blake could hardly have depicted the naturalistic concep- 
tion more unqualifiedly than in Spring. The efifusiveness of 
the child in this poem shows the extreme recoil from the 
decorum of the institutional ideal. 

Little boy, 
Full of joy; 
Little girl, 
Sweet and small ; 
Cock does crow, 
So do you; 
Merry voice, 
Infant noise, 
Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year. 

Little lamb. 
Here I am; 
Come and lick 
My white neck; 
Let me pull 
Your soft wool; 
Let me kiss 
Your soft face: 
Merrily, merrily, we welcome in the year. 

This is a romantic child. If energy, as Blake held, is 
the manifestation of soul, this child is richly endowed. Un- 
like the type he supersedes, Blake's child, it is obvious, has 
great capacity for feeling, but not for thought, because no 
restraining forces are recognized. Judgment is romanti- 
cally subordinated to feeling, which is held to be naturally 
good. Certainly, Blake's child in Spring has no inklings of 



298 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

the restrictive conscience for which Shaftes'bury substituted 
expansive emotion. Spontaneity is completely realized. 
Beyond this the poets who follow Shaftesbury can not go in 
their portrayal of children who wholeheartedly respond to 
impulses. The child is no longer a rational being, but a 
spontaneous creature that impulsively follows natural in- 
stincts. 



CHAPTER VII 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

More than any other eminent Enghsh man of letters, 
Wordsworth is the poet of childhood. His poetry depicts 
the moods and activities of children more extensively than 
verse prior to his. His heart was attuned to childhood in 
all its manifestations. Yet he did not write for children. 
Wordsworth's classification of his poems, mystifying in 
other respects, indicates clearly that he did not attempt a 
body of verse for children. Nevertheless, with affectionate 
and loving attention to detail he has noticed them from 
nursery days to school time. His poems contain a gallery 
of individual portraits, especially of subjects from the 
humbler walks of life, in London as well as in the Lake 
District and the southwestern counties of England. 

Although Wordsworth extended the boundaries of poet- 
ry to include all phases of childhood, his treatment is in 
harmony with that of poets from Prior to Crabbe. His 
poetry, with that of Blake, represents the fine flowering of 
the eighteenth-century attitude toward childhood. ^ There 
are, for instance, manifest suggestions of harmony between 
his lines on native fields and those that have been noted from 
Akenside to Southey. Sometimes, also, he echoes the very 
words of eighteenth-century poets, as in the third book of 
The Prelude, where his lines on the habits of youths at Cam- 
bridge University recall Tickell's passage on student life at 
Oxford, 

1 Until a careful study of Wordsworth's sources has been 
made in the light of eighteenth-century influences, his poetic method 
can not be fully understood. 



300 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Where the Black Edward passed his beardless youth. ^ 

Although Blake and Wordsworth alike felt the strong 
urge of influences at work in the eighteenth century, there is 
between them a difference of emphasis in the treatment of 
childhood. Both poets are fervent and warm in conception 
and expression. Yet, except possibly for a poem like the 
Ode, the body of Wordsworth's poetry about childhood re- 
veals a saner treatment. Wordsworth remarked of the 
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience: ''There is 
something in the madness of this man which interests me 
more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott." 
Nevertheless, Wordsworth held closer than Blake to com- 

1 Thomas Tickell's on Queen Caroline's rebuilding the lodg- 
ings of the Black Prince and Henry V. at Queens College, Oxford: 

In that coarse age were princes fond to dwell 

With meagre monks, and haunt the silent cell. 

Sent from the Monarch's to the Muses' court, 

Their meals were frugal, and their sleeps were short; 

To couch at curfew time they thought no scorn. 

And froze at matins every winter morn; 

They read on early book the starry frame, 

And lisped each constellation by its name; 

Art after art still dawning to their view. 

And their mind opening as their stature grew. 

In addressing his alma mater, Wordsworth contrasts the luxury- 
loving youths of his day with the abstemious "nurslings" who sub- 
mitted to academic discipline "from their first childhood," 

When, in forlorn and naked chambers cooped 

And crowded, o'er the ponderous books they hung 

Like caterpillars eating out their way 

In silence, or with keen devouring noise 

Not to be tracked or fathered. Princes then 

At matins froze, and couched at curfew-time. 

Trained up through piety and zeal to prize 

Spare diet, patient labour, and plain weeds. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 301 

men experience; the reader feels that he is in the presence 
of real children. The difference is due, in part at least, to 
poetic method. Wordsworth preferred to write, not like 
the earlier master during the spontaneous overflow of emo- 
tion, but in his favorite tranquil mood of recollected emotion. 
Unlike Blake, and much more like Sir Walter Scott, though 
in a different mood, he loved to localize his affections. His 
geographical sense, which led to the choice of definite back- 
grounds in most instances, kept him in the company of chil- 
dren of flesh and blood. 

His deep sense of moral responsibility served to em- 
phasize this trait of stern fidelity to outward fact. Blake's 
preternaturally bright and vivid backgrounds can seldom be 
localized. Blake asked for his visions of delight no merely 
terrestrial location. In Wordsworth, however, the geo- 
graphy of the background against which he oibserved chil- 
dren is as a rule clear and definite. Blake's Echoing Green 
will never be identified, because it incorporates the essential 
delights of children at play on any English village green. 
To localize it, as one loves to do with Wordworth's poems, 
would be out of keeping with Blake's vision of universal de- 
light for children at play out of doors. In The Prelude, 
Wordsworth individualizes and identifies the Bowling Green 
on the hillside above Lake Windermere, because his vision 
of happiness and contentment is affectionately associated 
with specific localities. His local feeling is strong. His 
mood demands, like Michael's at the unfinished sheep-fold, 
an object in nature with which to associate emotional ex- 
perience. Wordsworth is seldom concerned merely with 
airy fancies; he usually gives them a local habitation and 
a name. He gains in realism because he conveys the im- 
pression of writing with his eye on the individual child 
and his experiences. 



302 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Like Blake, Wordsworth found in the child unspoiled 
by man the most satisfying illustration of the simple life. 
He too would rejuvenate society by way of the child. But 
less radical than Blake, he did not wish to do away with 
institutions that militate against happiness, but instead to 
reform them by modifications which he considered practi- 
cal. His expressed wish to be considered as a teacher or as 
nothing, prompted him to write expository passages on the 
need of reform. As a result the humanitarian and ethical 
aspects are more obvious than in Blake. Wordsworth's 
preoccupation with childhood led him not only to a state- 
ment of moods which are the essence of universal child- 
hood, as in the Ode, or We Are Seven, but also to a con- 
sideration of the practical problems of education, as in The 
Prelude, and the reform of industrial abuses, as in The 
Excursion. 



The extent and depth of his interest in the varying 
manifestations of childhood are reflected in his notice of 
children under many circumstances and moods from birth 
to death, in the home or near it, in the fields and beside 
streams, in school or on the way to and from it. Unlike 
his predecessors, he observes children with equal variety 
and interest in the city as well as in the country. It is 
true that his somewhat rigid nature could not unbend suffi- 
ciently to make him the care-free companion of children — 
in the Anecdote for Fathers he appears awkward and ex- 
ternal — ^but he nevertheless reveals a consistent deep in- 
terest in them, and certainly never fails to notice them. Al- 
though he could not sport with them, he evinces an affection 
that prompted and lay at the heart of his philosophy of life, 
and conditioned his poetic expression of it. If he was not 
able to abandon himself to them in their lightsome moods, 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 303 

he yet honored the man who like the Wanderer in The Ex- 
cursion loved to have children about him : 

The rough sports 
And teasing ways of children vexed not him. 

(I, 415-416). 
Michael tells his son that they had been playmates among 
the hills, so that Luke did not 

Lack any pleasure which a boy can know. 
When Wordsworth expressed the anxiety he felt for Eng- 
land, he unaffectedly closed his sonnet by emphasizing 
afifection for his country in an image of the child whose 
devotion is whole-hearted and unquestioning. ^ In his most 
inspired lines, as well as in those which show him doggedly 
but vainly attempting to practice the theory of his Preface, 
Wordsworth is never far from contemplation of the simple 
thoughts and emotions of children. 

As a schoolboy at Hawkeshead he had observed chil- 
dren with a discriminating eye. When he returned during 
the summer vacation after his first year at Cambridge, he 
noticed that a change had come over children of those 
'*Whose occupation I really loved." It was a change Hke 
that wrought by an eight-days' absence from a garden in 

^ ° ' pale-faced babes whom I had left 

In arms, now rosy prattlers at the feet 
Of a pleased grandame tottering up and down; 
And growing girls whose beauty, filched away 
With all its pleasant promises, was gone 
To deck some slighted playmate's homely cheek. 2 

1 Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty, 
XVII. 

2 The Prelude (IV, 203-208). — Grandchildren are not fre- 
quently mentioned during the century before Wordsworth. He 
notices them again in Descriptive Sketches (1. 152), Anticipation, 
and in The Westmoreland Girl (To My Grandchildren). Burns 
has suggestive lines in New Year's Day and Second Epistle to Davie. 



304 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Unlike the bachelor poets of the eighteenth century (in 
Lines on a Sleeping Infant Cowper takes refuge in generali- 
ties), he enjoyed the inestimable advantage of children in 
his own household, and also the benefit of Dorothy's "see- 
ing" eyes.^ One of her letters to Lady Beaumont indi- 
cates that his delicate observation of traits that make for 
subtle characterization even in infants v^as stimulated 
probably by Dorothy's sympathetic observation of children: 
"Catherine is the only funny child in the family; the rest 
of the children are lively, but Catherine is comical in every 
look and motion. Thomas perpetually forces a tender 
smile by his simplicity, but Catherine makes you laugh out- 
right, though she can hardly say a dozen words, and she 
joins in the laugh, as if sensible of the drollery of her 
appearance." 

In its reflection of the fleeting moods of an individual 
child. Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old (1811) 
definitely marks Wordsworth as a precursor of the modern 
attitude, which tries to shadow forth in poetry such evan- 
escent moods as Wordsworth recorded in his own way by 
reference to the beauty of nature. He observes the child 
when it is alone, and when it plays in the presence of ad- 
miring friends or relatives. 

Loving she is, and tractable, though wild; 

And Innocence hath privilege in her 

To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes; 

And feats of cunning; and the pretty round 

Of trespasses, affected to provoke 

Mock-chastisement and partnership in play. 

And, as a faggot sparkles on the hearth, 

Not less if unattended and alone 

Than when both young and old sit gathered round 

And take delight in its activity; 

1 The Prelude, XIV, 232ff. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 305 

Even so this happy Creature of herself 

Is all-sufficient; solitude to her 

Is blithe society, who fills the air 

With gladness and involuntary songs. 

Light are her sallies as the tripping fawn's 

Forth-startled from the fern where she lay couched ; 

Unthought-of, unexpected, as the stir 

Of the soft b'*eezes ruffling the meadow-flowers, 

Or from before it chasing wantonly 

The many-coloured images imprest 

Upon the bosom of a placid lake. 

Dorothy has adapted herself exquisitely to the child's 
point of view in the Address to a Child During a Boisterous 
Winter Evening (1806). Without a suggestion of teach- 
ing, the lines picture Dorothy and the child by the winter- 
evening fireside. The fireside matter has here been de- 
veloped with delicate attention to the thought life and emo- 
tional reactions of an individual child. He is no longer, 
as before Burns, merely present, but his interest in the 
phenomena of a winter storm determines the choice of 
imagery. 

Hark ! over the roof he makes a pause. 

And growls as if he would fix his claws 

Right in the slates, and with a huge rattle 

Drive them down, like men in battle: 

— But let him range round; he does us no harm, 

We build up the fire, we're snug and warm; 

Untouched by his breath see the candle shines bright, 

And burns with a clear and steady light; 

Books have we to read, — ^but that half-stifled knell, 

Alas ! 'tis the sound of the eight o'clock bell. 

— Come now we'll to bed! and when we are there 

He may work his own will, and what shall we care? 

He may knock at the door, — we'll not let him in; 

May drive at the windows, — we'll laugh at his din; 

Let him seek his own home wherever it be ; 

Here's a cosie warm house for Edward and me. 



306 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

There is a suggestion of humor in the story of the mi- 
gration of the poor priest from Northumiberland to the 
Lakes. In their old age the priest and his wife never tired 
of recounting their experiences on the road. The motley 
train of horses with jingling bells and panniers, and the ass 
which carried their children, excited the curiosity of many 
a village Dogberry and "staid guardian of the public peace." 
Wordsworth singles out the priest's children (The Excur- 
sion, VII, 72-76J : 

Rocked by the motion of a trusty ass 
Two ruddy children hung, a well-poised freight, 
Each in a basket nodding drowsily; 
Their bonnets. I remember, wreathed with flowers, 
Which told it was the pleasant month of June. 

On the basis of his poetry it would be possible to 
reconstruct the life of a young child from the moment of 
its birth. He does not relegate children to a similitude, 
but in all his poems reveals a personal interest. The in- 
fant at the moment of its birth is interesting to the poet 
who has brooded on the destiny of man. He carries on 
the eighteenth-centurv desire for children in the home, as 
in The Warning (1833), where the humble cottage is 

blest 
With a new visitant, an infant guest. 

The lines To the Reverend Dr. Wordsuwrth (1820) con- 
tain charming glimpses of the age-old custom of minstrels 
who played their Christmas tunes under cottage windows, a 
custom not noted in connection with childhood by poets 
during the century before Wordsworth. At such times un- 
bidden tears rise 

For names once heard, and heard no more; 
Tears brightened by the serenade 
For infant in the cradle laid. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 307 

In The Excursion (V, 278) he notices the infant at time of 
baptism, "a day of solemn ceremonial," the infant being 

For this occasion daintily adorned, 
At the baptismal font, 

where the consecrating element cleanses "the original stain" 
and ''corrupt affections," and where, 

high as the thought of man 
Can carry virtue, virtue is professed. 

(V, 287-288) 

His sonnet Baptism (1827) likewise indicates that Words- 
worth did not follow literally the doctrine of natural good- 
ness. In addition to the ceremony itself he notices the 
circle of family and friends at the font, the infant being, 
meanwhile, not overlooked. 

In his lines To the Moan (1835) he gives a charming 
glimpse of the gestures of an infant attracted by the 

moon, whose powers 

are charms 
That fascinate the very Babe in arms. 
While he, uplifted towards thee, laughs outright, 
Spreading his little palms in his glad Mother's sight. 

Dorothy's The Cottager to her Infant (1805), ''sug- 
gested to her while 'beside my sleeping children," is a 
homely lullaby not at all conceived in the traditional man- 
ner. Details of the cottage are those which would naturally 
attract an infant. The song, which seems to be spontan- 
eously suggested while the mother is singing to her babe, 
gives a realistic air of improvisation. 

The days are cold, the nights are long. 
The north-wind sings a doleful song; 
Then hush again upon my breast; 
All merry things are now at rest, 
Save thee, my pretty Love ! 



308 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The kitten sleeps upon the hearth, 
The crickets long have ceased their mirth; 
There's nothing stirring in the house 
Save one wee, hungry, nibbling mouse, 
Then why so busy thou? 

Nay! start not at that sparkling light; 
*Tis but the moon that shines so bright 
On the window pane bedropped with rain: 
Then, little Darling! sleep again. 
And wake when it is day. 

Lullabies are rare in the century from Prior to Words- 
worth, probably because it was the age of reason and en- 
lightenment ; and the strength of the dissenting element, 
which would not be in sympathy with the beautiful con- 
ception of the Virgin and Child, militated against a spon- 
taneous lyrical phrasing of lullabies conceived in the me- 
dieval tradition. Watts's lullaby is essentially Puritanical. 
It is not until Coleridge's The Virgin's Cradle Hymn, which 
he translated from a Latin hymn "copied from a print of 
the Virgin, in a Roman Catholic village in Germany," that 
the tender mother spirit of the medieval lullabies finds 
recognition among Romantic poets. ^ Although Blake 
combines naturalistic thought and Christian phrasing in his 
lullabies, he was too much out of sympathy with the Church 
to enter into the spirit of the Cradle Hymns of the Virgin. 
How far removed even the transcendental Coleridge was 
from the traditional spirit of the Virgin and Child is patent 
in his Christmas Carol ("The shepherds went their hasty 
way"), which Bullen justly criticizes for ineptness of phras- 
ing. Dorothy Wordsworth has altogether left the tradition- 

1 Thomas Warton's On Sir Joshua Reynolds' Painted Win- 
dow (at New College, Oxford), 1782, has the lines: 

Heaven's golden emanation, gleaming mild 
O'er the mean cradle of the Virgin's Child. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 309 

al element in order to sing in the mood of a cottage mother 
who, in crooning over her babe, weaves in the commonest 
facts of household observation. The two additional stanzas, 
composed by Wordsworth, clearly mark the lullaby as a 
north of England mother's song. 

Coleridge's A Child's Evening Prayer, written for chil- 
dren, gives simple expression to sentiments which a child 
would voice in prayer for members of the household. In 
Wordsworth's Guilt and Sorrow the unfortunate woman be- 
gins the story of her life by recollections of her pious father, 
who taught her in earliest childhood to repeat her evening 
prayers : 

And I believe that, soon as I began 

To lisp, he made me kneel beside my bed, 

And in his hearing there my prayers I said. 

Three poems associated with Dora Wordsworth give 
intimate glimpses of the poet and his daughter. They re- 
veal an essentially modern attitude in the poet's willing- 
ness to note an individual child, from the manifestations of 
whose interest he catches spiritual gleams that cheer and 
ennoble the parent who sees in his child the hope of the 
future. ^ 

One of the nearest approaches he has made to the 
spontaneous lightsome joy of children in activity is found in 
The Kitten and Falling Leaves (1804). In spite of its 
length and the poet's tendency, toward the close, to moralize 
and forget the infant in thoughts of his own wishes for hap- 
piness, the poem is a "pretty baby-treat." Under the elder 
bush in the cottage garden, "little Tabby" works "Like an 
Indian conjuror" for the amusement of the poet and his 
infant : 

^ Compare the attitude of Coleridge toward his infant son 
Hartley in Frost at Midnight. 



310 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

That way look, my Infant, lo! 

What a pretty baby-show ! 

See the Kitten on the wall, 

Sporting with the leaves that fall, 

Withered leaves — one — two — and three — 

From the lofty elder-tree ! 

Through the calm and frosty air 

Of this morning bright and fair, 

Eddying round and round they sink 

Softly, slowly: one might think, 

From the motions that are made, 

Every little leaf conveyed 

Sylph or Faery hither tending, — 

To this lower world descending. 

Each invisible and mute. 

In his wavering parachute. 

— But the Kitten, how she starts. 

Crouches, stretches, paws, and darts ! 

First at one, and then its fellow, 

Just as light and just as yellow; 

There are many now — now one — 

Now they stop and there are none : 

What intenseness of desire 

In her upward eye of fire ! 

With a tiger-leap half-way 

Now she meets the coming prey. 

Lets it go as fast, and then 

Has it in her power again. . . . 

His Address to my Infant Daughter, Dora (on being re- 
minded that she zi^as a month old that day, September i6, 
1804) shows how totally the attitude toward children in 
this type of poem had changed in one hundred years. Prior's 
courtly lines to a child of quality were written exactly a 
century earlier. In Wordsworth's parental eyes the infant 
is a ''mild oflfspring of infirm humanity," and a ''frail, feeble 
monthHng." These phrases indicate the poet's willingness 
to face a fact that does not necessarily embellish the subject. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 311 

In his thoughts the child is but one tiny manifestation of 
the vast forces of the universe. In the contemplation, 
moreover, of what she would have been had she been 
born an Indian child, he is carried far from Prior's charm- 
ing make-believe. The passages in which he observes the 
nascent smiles of the infant are permeated with that spirit 
of consecration which is associated with Wordsworth's at- 
titude toward nature in such a poem as Tintern Abbey. 
The infant's smiles are ''feelers of love," tokens and signs, 
which, 

when the appointed season hath arrived, 
Joy, as her holiest language, shall adopt. 

Like classicist poets he looks beyond the child into the fu- 
ture; but his forward look is more accurately described as 
vision — ^that feeling after an elusive something which 
baffles expression. The urbane perspicuity which satisfied 
the readers of Prior's day has given place to vague, tanta- 
lizing emotion. The tokens and signs of this emotion bring 
spiritual assurances with which writers on childhood had 
not busied themselves since the days of Earle and Vaughan. 
In the appealing lines to his favorite daughter Dora ("A 
little onward lend thy guiding hand," 1816), Wordsworth 
recalls how he had carried her 

A tottering infant, with compliant stoop 
From flower to flower supported. 

Now he is her companion still, 

but to curb 
Thy nymph-like step swift-bounding o'er the lawn. 
Along loose rocks, or the slippery verge 
Of foaming torrents. 

Dora is her father's companion in his early-morning walk ; 
they climb together to the top of ''some smooth ridge" to 



312 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

feel the exhilaration of height and distance. He would be 
her guide through woods and forest 

to behold 
There how the Original of human art, 
Heaven-prompted Nature, measures and erects 
Her temples. . . . 

He reviewed the classical authors with her, and scaled "to 
heights more glorious still" of Holy Writ, 

where this Darling of my care. 
Advancing with me hand in hand, may learn, 
Without forsaking a too earnest world. 
To calm the affections, elevate the soul, 
And consecrate her life to truth and love. 

Poets from Thomson to the end of the century had given 
many glimpses of the loving care of parents for their chil- 
dren. Yet none is so winning as this in the sincere mani- 
festation of the heart-felt companionship existing betv^een 
Wordsworth and his daughter Dora (she was in tempera- 
ment a second Dorothy), in whom he found support in his 
old age after he had been deprived of Dorothy's companion- 
ship by the clouding of her mind. 

Wordsworth's insistence on freedom for children, and 
their natural right to enjoyment of it in undisturbed, un- 
supervised communion with nature, is winningly expressed 
in one of the most appealing of the Duddon sonnets. He 
observed cottage children at play far from the contamination 
of cities. There is no suggestion of pastoralities ; Words- 
worth had observed these children ; and that he wrote with 
his eye on the object is clear from the fact that the cottage 
near which the children tumbled has been identified. They 
are the companions of the solitude-loving Duddon, near 
whose banks stood the cottage "rude and grey" 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 313 

Whose ruddy children, by the mother's eyes 
Carelessly watched, sport through the summer day, 
Thy pleased associates: — light as endless May 
On infant bosoms lonely Nature lies. (V) 

The natural attractipn which running water has for chil- 
dren is reflected by the Romanticist poets, who were them- 
selves ever striving to live over again the care-free days of 
childhood. Wordsworth is like them in this love for 
streams and brooks, and when he wishes to correct despon- 
dency in The Excursion, he points to the simple cottage-boy 
who is wholly absorbed in play at a mill-dam. 

"May I name 
Without offence, that fair-faced cottage-boy i 
Dame Nature's pupil of the lowest forpi, 
Youngest apprentice in the school of art ! 
Him, as we entered from the open glen., 
You might have noticed, busily engaged. 
Heart, soul, and hands, — in mending the defects 
Left in the fabric of a leaky dam 
Raised for enabling this penurious stream 
To turn a slender mill (that new-made plaything) 
For his delight — the happiest he of all !" 

(HI, 196-206) 

In their endeavor to win man back to a simple Hfe, poets 
instinctively held up the child as an ideal example of simple, 
if not divine, contentment. Wordsworth's wide observa- 
tion of children in the Lake District provided him with a 
rich fund of experience. He never ceased to draw upon 
this in order to give point to the plea that, he intended, 
should win men by the contemplation of innocent child- 
hood which spontaneously found its richest enjoyments in 
the presence of nature. So the group which had been ob- 
serving the boy are led to thoughts of the divine happiness 
for which poets of the eighteenth century had longed. 



314 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

"Far happiest," answered the desponding Man, 

"If, such as he now is, he might remain ! 

Ah ! what avails imagination high 

Or question deep?" (Ill, 207-210) 

Wordsworth is ever thinking of the problem of the soul life 
of man. Like Blake he believes that all the sophistications 
and reasonings of man will lead man nowhere. In his poetry 
generally, as in the Ode, he is satisfied to rest in childhood, 
because there the sense of unity has not been disturbed by 
the interposition of reason. 

The Other, not displeased, 
Promptly replied' — "My notion is the same. 
And I, without reluctance, could decline 
All act of inquisition whence we rise, 
And what, when breath hath ceased, we may become. 
Here are we, in a bright and breathing world. 
Our origin, what matters it?" ^ (III, 233-238) 

No other poet has so widely and sympathetically ob- 
served children in communion with the external nature 
poets had exalted from the time of Thomson. Nature and 
the boy led the group to thoughts of ''natural piety" ; and 
it was Wordsworth's belief that children were happiest and 
most effectively taught in the presence of nature.- 

Although he preferred to write of children in rural sur- 
roundings, Wordsworth, nevertheless, more fully than any 
poet of the eighteenth century, has observed children in 
crowded surroundings of the metropolis. 

1 "Wisdom doth live with children round her knees" (Poems 
Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty, IV). 

2 This is likewise the attitude of Coleridge. In Frost at Mid- 
night the "philosopher" father contemplates in rosy dreams the 
boyhood days of Hartley, who is to receive spiritual suggestions 
from his companionship with external nature. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 315 

He often visited London, but was not, any more than 
the benevolist poets, in sympathy with city Hfe. In the city 
he pined a discontented sojourner. He refers peevishly to 
the shrill cries of London streets. Favorite phrases are 
''this noisy world," ''monstrous ant-hill," "barricadoed ever- 
more within the walls of cities," and "mean shapes on every 
side." He was offended by the environment to which chil- 
dren were exposed. Referring to the ingenuous moments 
of his youth when his outlook on life was very simple, he 
tells in The Prelude of the child placed in the middle of a 
table surrounded by men and women gathered there by 
chance. After describing the child's beauty in unsurpassed 
lines, he fears for its future. As the poet muses over the 
experience, he thinks that perhaps the child has grown to 
an age when he can look with envy on the babe who sleeps 
undisturbed beside a mountain chapel — the image chosen 
to express his preference for rural innocence and purity. 

foremost of the scenes. 
Which yet survive in memory, appears 
One, at v^-hose center sate a lovely Boy, 
A sportive infant, who, for six months' space, 
Not more, had been of age to deal about 
Articulate prattle — Child as beautiful 
As ever clung around a mother's neck. 
Or father fondly gazed upon with pride. 
* 

The Boy had been 
The pride and pleasure of all lookers-on 
In whatsoever place, but seemed in this 
A sort of alien scattered from the clouds. 
A lusty vigour, more than infantine 
He was in limb, in cheek a summer rose 
Just three parts blown — a cottage child — if e'er, 
By cottage-door on breezy mountain-side, 
Or in some sheltering vale, was seen a babe 
By Nature's gift so favoured. Upon a board 



316 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Decked with refreshments had this child been placed, 

His little stage in the vast theatre, 

And there he sate surrounded with a throng 

Of chance spectators, chiefly dissolute men 

And shameless women, treated and caressed; 

Ate, drank, and with the fruit and glasses played, 

While oaths and laughter and indecent speech 

Were rife about him as the songs of birds 

Contending after showers. The mother now 

Is fading out of memory, but I see 

The lovely Boy as I beheld him then 

Among the wretched and the falsely gay. 

Like one of those who walked with hair unsinged 

Amid the fiery furnace. (VII, 334-370) 

His glimpses of child life in London indicate clearly that, 
if he did not always look with approval, he did look in- 
tently. His attitude toward London during his first youth- 
ful visit is channingly described in a beautiful image from 
child life. Although he saw vulgar men, and observed 
houses, pavements, streets, and degraded forms on all sides, 
he was not satisfied with externalities, but 

a simple look 
Of child-like inquisition now and then 
Cast upwards on thy countenance, to detect 
Some inner meanings which might harbour there. 

(Prelude, VIII, 535-538) 

Wordsworth's deep affection for children, and his sym- 
pathy with the natural love of parents for their children, are 
reflected in a reminiscence of his first sojourn in London. 
The passage again reveals his ability to strike off a picture 
of city life, and is in its place among lines on city children 
as memorable as the sonnet composed on Westminster 
Bridge, which reveals the poet of mountain and lakes giving 
final phrasing to a mood characteristic of a great city. 
He had observed a father, an artificer, who sat on a stone 
near an iron paling that enclosed a grass-plot. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 317 

there, in silence, sate 
This One Man, with a sickly babe outstretched 
Upon his knee, whom he had thither brought 
For sunshine, and to breathe the fresher air. 
Of those who passed, and me who looked at him. 
He took no heed; but in his brawny arms 
(The Artificer was to the elbow bare, 
And from his work this moment had been stolen) 
He held the child, and, bending over it. 
As if he were afraid both of the sun 
And of the air, which he had come to seek, 
Eyed the poor babe with love unutterable. 

He writes from the point of view of the countryman who 
pities city folk because of their lack of fresh air and free- 
dom, and notes the father's timid gestures that would shield 
the child from sun and breeze, to which Wordsworth had 
been accustomed from early childhood. The poet's heart 
was moved; like Thomson he felt for suffering childhood 
everywhere, but unlike him was able to visualize concretely 
whatever his sympathetic heart led him to observe. It is 
characteristic of his wide interest in children that he should 
have noticed among the "fermenting mass of human-kind" 
in London this detail of the father with his sickly child. 

In Power of Music (1806) the street fiddler holds men, 
women, and children spellbound. 

That errand-bound 'Prentice was passing in haste— 
What matter ! he's caught— and his time runs to waste. 

The fiddler wins coins from old and young, 

and there ! 
The one-pennied Boy has his penny to spare. 

Even the cripple responds to the rhythm ; and the poet ob- 
serves 

That Mother, whose spirit in fetters is bound, 

While she dandles the Babe in her arms to the sound. 



318 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The earlier Reverie of Poor Susan (1797) shows how a 
country-bred girl is moved by the song of a caged thrush 
to forget momentarily the hard streets of London in recol- 
lection of her native fields. Wordsworth transmutes city 
surroundings into scenery of her native valley. 

Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, 
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside. 

Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale, 
Down which she so often has tripped with her pail; 
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's, 
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves. 

Crowds of men and women and the noises of traffic 
never appealed to Wordsworth as they did to Charles Lamb, 
who felt it impossible to be dull in Fleet Street, and who 
while walking about London streets at night shed tears be- 
cause of the ''fulness of joy at so much life." Solitude was 
essential to Wordsworth's being; the Wordsworth Con- 
cordance notes more than two hundred instances of the 
words ''soHtude" and ''solitary." He is attracted by the 
more tranquil side streets where he is free to observe a 
father with his sick child, or poor Susan, or the fiddler and 
his audience. He can and does depict with poetic power 
and sure sense for suggestive detail the endless stream of 
men and moving things ; the dance of colors, lights, and 
forms ; the deafening din ; the endless rows of facades ; and 
shop after shop with inscriptions and flaring signs. But 
he impatiently escapes from these as from an enemy, and 
turns 

Abruptly into some sequestered nook, 

Still as a sheltered place where winds blow loud! 

{Prelude, VII, 170-171) 

Here sights and sounds come at intervals only; but he has 
sketched them with notice of street amusements chieflv 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 319 

designed for children. There are dancing dogs, or he sees 
a dromedary with performing monkeys on his back; or 

a raree-show is here, 
With children gathered round. 

(Prelude, VII, I74-I75) 

Before Wordsworth, such elements as the raree-show 
appeared only in satirical verse ; but Wordsworth has treated 
amusements of children in a mood of high seriousness that 
catches spiritual connotations not noticed by poets of the 
eighteenth century. These elements are more congenial to 
Wordsworth when he can observe them at a rural fair in one 
of the dales among his native hills, where on the green 
stands a speech-maker by rote, 
Pulling the strings of his boxed raree-show 

among the itinerant hawkers and other country-fair attrac- 
tions for young and old. 

The children now are rich, for the old today 

Are generous as the young . . . 

The days departed start again to life, 

And all the scenes of childhood reappear, 

Faint, but more tranquil. (VIII, 44-50 

Gaiety and cheerfulness prevail among old and young; yet 
to the brooding poet 

How little they, they and their doings, seem, 

And all that they can further or obstruct ! 

Through utter weakness pitiably dear. 

As tender infants are : and yet how great ! 

For all things serve them. (VIII, 59-63) 

They are ministered to by rocks, clouds, and 

The wild brooks prattling from invisible haunts ; 
And old Helvellyn, conscious of the stir 
Which animates this day their calm abode. 

(VIII, 67-69) 



320 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

In the ''turbulent" city Wordsworth felt the debt he owed 
to nature and ''rural peace," where his heart had been first 
opened to beauty. He has enriched the material of satirical 
poets by throwing over commonplace events and experiences 
a halo born of imaginative treatment stirred by deep emo- 
tion. ^ 

In their preoccupation with soHtude in forests and by 
streams, poets had overlooked the possibilities of holidays 
enjoyed by children at fairs, theatres, and amusement 
places. Prior's Alma (1718) gives only a side glance to 
Smithfield Fair. ^ It is a curious fact that the only full and 
detailed picture of a city amusement resort should have 
been drawn as observed by the boy from a remote shire in 
the north of England. It was to be expected that he 
would be profoundly moved by the orators in Parliament. 

Oh ! the beating heart, 
When one among the prime of these rose up, — 
One, of whose name from childhood we had heard 
Familiarly, a household term, like those, 
The Bedfords, Glosters. Salisburys, of old 
Whom the fifth Harry talks of. (VII, 493-498) 

This is the mood of a boy bred like Wordsworth to solid 
stability and faith in British institutions ; it is in harmony 
too with his characteristic elevation of spirit. His vivid 
lines on Bartholomew Fair come somewhat as a surprise. 
Temperamentally out of sympathy with the perpetual whirl 

1 Contrast the luxuriant imagery of Frost at Midnight. 

2 Now mark, dear Richard, from the age 
That children tread this worldly stage. 
Broom-staff or poker they bestride. 
And round the parlour love to ride; 
Till thoughtful father's pious care 
Provides his brood, next Smithfield Fair, 

With supplemental hobby-horses. (Canto I) 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 321 

of trivial objects and the anarchy and din ''barbarian and 
infernal" of such a place, this simple north-country youth 
was momentarily fascinated by the 

phantasma, 
Monstrous in color, motion, shape, sight, sound. 

that constituted for him a "Parliament of Monsters." What 
fascinated him was that he saw there 

blank confusion ! true epitome 
Of what the mighty city is herself, 
To thousands upon thousands of her sons. 

(VII, 722-724) 

It was a shock for eyes and ears to see how tents and booths, 

as if the whole were one vast mill, 
Are vomiting, receiving on all sides, 
Men, Women, three-years' Children, Babes in arms. 

(719-721) 

The passage depicts the motley spectacle of "All out-o'-the- 
way, far-fetched, perverted things" in marvellous array. 

The midway region, and above. 
Is thronged with staring pictures and huge scrolls. 
Dumb proclamations of the Prodigies ; 
With chattering monkeys dangling from their poles. 
And children whirling in their roundabouts; 
With those that stretch the neck and strain the eyes, 
And crack the voice in rival ship, the crowd 
Inviting; with buffoons against buffoons 
Grimacing, writhing, screaming, — him who grinds 
The hurdy-gurdy, at the fiddle weaves, 
Rattles the salt-box, thumps the kettle-drum. 
And him who at the trumpet puffs his cheeks. 
The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel. 
Equestrians, tum'blers, women, girls, and boys. 
Blue-breeched, pink-vested, with high-towering plumes. — 



322 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

All moveables of wonder, from all parts, 
Are here — Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs, 
The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig, 
The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire, 
Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl, 
The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes. 
The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft 
Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows. 

(VII, 691-713)- 

It is in fact a lively roll-call of what any child w^ould delight 
to see, and the passage reproduces the spirit of youthful ex- 
citement and rapid change of interest easily satisfied on 
such a crowded stage. 

Wordsworth had also been attracted by pantomime at 
Sadler's Wells, which must have been to English children 
of that age what the Hippodrome is to American children. 
With the unaffected delight of youth he took his seat there 
"more than once" to see 

giants and dwarfs. 

Clowns, conjurors, posture-masters, harlequins, 

Amid the uproar of the rabblement. 

Perform their feats. (VII, 271-274) 

Wordsworth's interest was that of a healthy youngster 
who with his worship of nature could blend pleasures of 
the average child. He was one of the noisy crew of school- 
boys at Hawkeshead, and he was equally a partaker of the 
more superficial pleasures provided by London for its chil- 
dren. At Sadler's Wells he beheld 

The champion. Jack the Giant-killer : Lo ! 

He dons his coat of darkness; on the stage 

Walks, and achieves his wonders, from the eye 

Of living Mortal covert, "as the moon 

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave." 

Delusion bold! and how can it be wrought? 

The garb he wears is black as death, the word 

''Invisible" flames forth upon his chest. (VII, 280-287) 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH - 323 

Yet, even in those days, he had made no small progress 
in ''meditations holy and sublime" : 

Yet something of a girlish child-like gloss 
Of novelty survived of scenes like these ; 
Enjoyment haply handed down from times 
When at a country-playhouse, some rude barn 
Tricked out for that proud use, if I perchance 
Caught, on a sumrri^r evening through a chink 
In the old wall, an unexpected glimpse 
Of daylight, the bare thought of where I was 
Gladdened me more than if I had been led 
Into a dazzling cavern of romance, 
Crowded with Genii busy among works 
Not to be looked at by the common sun. 

(VII, 446-457) 
Although it is clear from Ashton's researches ^ that a 
kind of entertainment appreciated by children was in vogue 
during the reign of Queen Anne, and although it is known 
that there were Christmas pantomimes, it is remarkable 
that these are not noticed by poets even in the satirical 
vein. Such Christmas theatricals and pantomimes as are 
designed especially for children at Yuletide in New York 
must have been common also in the London of those 
days. Although the Puritans had in 1642 made Christmas 
a day of prayer and fasting, pantomimes and Christmas 
plays seem to have flourished from the days of the seven- 
teenth century itself. Merrymaking is implied, for instance, 
in Anna L. Barbauld's Groans of the Tankard: 

No Carnival is even Christmas here 

And one long Lent involves the meagre year. 

The Christmas Harlequinades which were given at Co- 
vent Garden and Drury Lane date from the seventeenth 
century, and were at their height under Garrick. They 

1 Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, by John Ashton. 
Compare also A Right Merrie Christmasse by the same author. 



324 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

opened with a fairy tale, the characters of which changed to 
harlequin, columbine, and clown of the pantomime that fol- 
lowed. There were Christmas plays at Manchester Gram- 
mar School during 1739, 1740, and 1741. 'The Monthly Re- 
view" in 1774 has a good review of A Christmas Tale in 
Five Parts, A Nezv Dramatic Entertainment. 

Children must surely have been diverted by the St. 
George plays with Old Father Christmas. Professor 
Manly quotes to show that the version he prints was ased 
in the eighteenth century: 'The man from whom I took 
(it) down had performed at Brill in the year 1807, and his 
father had done the same at Thame Park in the previous 
century." If the Lutterworth Christmas Play would have 
made less appeal to children, the Revesby Sword Play, Pro- 
fessor Manly's version of which is dated ''October ye 20, 
1779," would have fascinated them. 

Carey does not notice theatricals in Sally in Our Alley 
(1715), although the thrifty apprentice lover says that he 
will save his money for Sally against the coming of Christ- 
mas. Christmas is, indeed, infrequently noticed in connec- 
tion with childhood. Wordsworth has more fully than 
other poets referred to the holiday which is identified with 
children. He has noticed it in the Idle Shepherd-Boys, 
To the Rev. Dr. Wordsworth, The Prelude, and The Thorn, 
and connects the holiday with childhood in each poem. 

In spite of all Wordsworth's childlike wonder, he is not 
confused by his novel experiences in London, but while tell- 
ing the pathetic story of the Maid of Buttermere is loyal 
to his ideal of the simple life far from city excitements, and 
writes of her in terms of native fields. After her troubles 
("The broad world rang with the maiden's name"), 
She lives in peace 
Upon the spot where she was born and reared ; 
Without contamination doth she live 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 325 

In quietness, without anxiety : 

Beside the mountain chapel, sleeps in earth 

Her new-born infant, fearless as a lamb 

That, thither driven from some unsheltered place, 

Rests underneath the little rock-like pile 

When storms are raging. Happy are they both — 

Mother and child! (VH, 320-329) 

As he noticed children everywhere in city and country 
alike, so he observed with a peculiar tenderness the graves 
of children in the lonely churchyards of the north of Eng- 
land. His Essays Upon Epitaphs reflect an EngHshman's in- 
terest in the graves of the village dead. Americans who on 
their travels do not identify England with London are im- 
pressed by the unaffected piety of worshippers in outlying 
parishes, who before and after vesper service walk about in 
God's acre, keeping green the memory of departed friends 
and relatives. There is nothing unusual or morbid in the 
impulse that led Wordsworth to write his essays, and to 
quote examples from memorial stones. How far he is from 
morbidity and the melancholy of Gray or White is clear from 
the feeling lines on his school companion at Hawkeshead, 
who lived but to be buried in the village where he was born. 
Wordsworth is not despondent, but his heart is touched by 
remembrance of the boy who was one of the ''race of young 
ones": 

This Boy was taken from his mates and died 

In childhood, ere he was full twelve years old. 

Fair is the spot, most beautiful the vale 

Where he was born ; the grassy churchyard hangs 

Upon a slope above the village school. 

And through the churchyard when my way has led 

On summer evenings, I believe that there 

A long half hour together I have stood 

Mute, looking at the grave in which he lies. 

(V, 389-397) 



326 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

The custom of reading epitaphs reveals a simple sin- 
cerity that shows in English people that fibre of genuineness 
which Wordsworth admired and exalted in the ''statesmen" 
of the Lake District. We have observed that Henry Kirke 
White had interwoven the custom with the return at eve 
of the laborer and his children, and Wordsworth, like that 
father in White's poem, draws lessons from what he reads. 
'Tn the obscure corner of a country church-yard I once 
espied, half overgrown with hemlock and nettles, a very 
small stone laid upon the ground, bearing nothing more 
than the name of the deceased with the date of birth and 
death, importing that it was an infant which had been born 
one day and died the following. I know not how far the 
Reader may be in sympathy with me; but more awful 
thoughts of rights conferred, of hopes awakened, or re- 
membrances stealing away or vanishing, were imparted to 
my mind by that inscription there before my eyes than by 
any other that it has ever been my lot to meet with upon a 
tomb-stone." Among the epitaphs on children he quotes 
this example : 

What Christ said once He said to all, 
Come unto Me, ye children small : 
None shall do you any wrong, 
For to My Kingdom you belong. 

Wordsworth's genius is expressing itself with characteris- 
tic simple beauty when he writes that a pure woman's life is 

As snowdrop on an infant's grave. ^ 

In a beautiful sonnet he has with unadorned simplicity 
commemorated ancient rites observed by ''rude Biscayans" 
in the burial of children who died in "sinless time of in- 

1 Elegiac Stanzas (Addressed to Sir G. H. B. upon the death 
of his sister-in-law), pub. 1827. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 327 

fancy." ^ In the third book of The Excursion the Solitary 
relates how he lost his ''blooming girl" and her brother, the 
only remaining stay of his life; and the compact lines in 
the Lucy poems likewise voice the sense of loss experienced 
by those who are left behind. Wordsworth's meek spirit of 
Christian love comes out tenderly in the epitaph for his son 
Thomas (1812?). 

Six months to six years added he remained 

Upon this sinful earth, by sin unstained : 

O blessed Lord ! whose mercy then removed 

A Child whom every eye that looked on loved; 

Support us, teach us calmly to resign 

What we possessed, and now is wholly thine ! 

II 

No serious attempt seems to have been made either by 
Wordsvv^orth or by eighteenth-century poets to connect me- 
dieval castles and ruins with childhood. The castles and 
abbeys of which romantic poets loved to write, did not 
prove suitable places for children. When the earlier poets 
felt free to leave Pope and the classicist tradition, Thomson 
was their chief inspiration. They were too strongly drawn 
to universal benevolence and the return to nature to be 
deeply stirred by matters of antiquarian interest.^ Beattie 
ignored the specifically medieval element in the ancestral 
seat of the young Lord Hay in order to write of uni- 

1 Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty, 
XXIV, "In due observance of an ancient rite." 

2 J. G. Cooper's Call of Aristippus is hardly an exception. 
Cooper attempted to heighten the child's sense of fear by having 
him overtaken by night near a ruined abbey. Attracted by flowers, 
he had wandered in a forest, near which he sank down to rest 
amid the "dark horrors of the night" and far from a "fondling 
mother's sight." Cooper localizes the spot near "Where an old 
abbey stood." 



328 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

versal benevolence. Wordsworth recollected childhood 
play within the confines of ruined abbeys and castles, but 
showed no inclination to develop medieval elements. 

As a child Wordsworth played in and about Cocker- 
mouth Castle, Brougham Castle, and Furness Abbey. Yet 
in all recollections he subordinates the romantic element, 
where he is conscious of it at all, to his love of nature. 
Cockermouth Castle is of interest to him only in so far as 
the river Derwent reflected the shadow of the towers of that 
''shattered monument of feudal sway." In the Address 
from the Spirit of Cockermouth Castle the tower is a com- 
peer stricken like himself in years. When as a child he 
entered the dungeon, he became a "prey to soul-appalling 
darkness," but only with the conventional result that his 
thoughts were led to the darkness of the grave. He chased 
the butterfly in the "green courts," or climbed the battle- 
ments to gather flowers. This is certainly not the spirit 
of romance. ^ 

1 Lovibond's On Rebuilding Combe Neville reveals greater sym- 
pathy with nature than with the castle background. Although his 
attention is about equally divided between nature and the castle, 
references to the latter are mechanical. They are hardly merged 
with the recollection of Lovibond's youthful roamings within the 
confines of Combe Neville, the seat of the kingmaker Warwick. 
The wars of the roses are alluded to; gatherings of knights and 
ladies are recalled; Warwick is spoken of as tilting in the court- 
yard. But such thoughts are suggested by the schoolboy's reading 
rather than by a mood induced by the castle itself. Such phrases as 
"dread mansion" and "gothic tower" suggest more to us than was felt 
by the youthful Lovibond. One stanza shows how unconscious he 
was of the romantic possibilities of the castle. He sought "thy 
awful grove," not to feel a pleasing sense of mystery or horror, 
but to soothe his evening hours with "that best deceiver, Love." 

The morbid White must have had remote sympathies with the 
romantic gloom of castles and abbeys (Childhood). In youth he 
retired to the "gloomy glen" to muse on lofty themes, ancient lore, 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 329 

Brougham Castle, "romantic" and "low-standing" by 
the margin of a stream, served to recall how he and Dorothy 
climbed the "darksome windings of a broken stair," and 
"not without trembling" climbed along a "fractured" wall. 
The trembling was not induced by fear of spirits. Instead, 
he and Dorothy looked through a "Gothic window's open 
space," not like Keats into fairy lands forlorn, but upon a 
"far-stretching landscape." Or they "lay on some turret's 
head" listening to the breeze as it lightly waved the tufts of 
grass and harebells. Their interest was chiefly in natural 
beauty. The castle, in spite of the mention of architectural 
details, is nothing more than a convenient belvedere. ^ 

and heroes of old. By this time the modern reader is on the 
alert for romantic moods. White is in fact thinking of Britomart, 
Una, and "courteous Constance." On his evening walk, as he 
gazed up to the clouds, his fancy- 
stately towers descried, sublimely high, 
In Gothic grandeur frowning on the sky. 

But here again the glimpse of romantic matter is fleeting, and con- 
nected only vaguely with his reminiscences of youthful walks. 

In Netley Abbey, W. Sotheby, Esq., briefly notices the senti- 
mental attitude of his boyish days. "At day's dim close" he had 
often stopped to meditate 

where first arose 
The pointed ruin peeping o'er the wood. 

He ascribes the mood to childhood : "with life's gay dawn th' 
illusions cease." 

1 Jago's Edge Hill (1767) shows premonitions of the value of 
romantic material. It is difficult for readers of Scott and Tenny- 
son to realize just how much was associated in Jago's mind with 
such romantic names as Kenilworth, Guy of Warwick, Coventry, 
and Godiva. Such embellishments of medieval castles as the 
moat and portcullis are treated in the enumerative style. Jago's 
poem is topographical and has to do with the district near War- 



330 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

His references to ruined shrines and temples are also 
bare of detail, as in The Prelude, when he merely notices 
Druidic remains or recalls in passing the *'chaunted rites" 
which daily served the shrine of ''Our Lady" on an island 
in Lake Windermere. He seems to feel little irreverence in 
boyish escapades among the ruins of Furness Abbey in the 
"Vale of Nightshade, to St. Mary's honor built." He and 
his schoolfellows whipped and spurred their horses, and flew 
through the chantry in "uncouth race," past the "cross- 
legged knight and the stone abbot," and out through open- 
ings in the ruined walls. If Wordsworth does not respond 
to the medieval relics, his spirit is moved by that "single 
wren" that sang so sweetly in the ruined nave that the poet 
could have lived there forever "to hear such music." The 
emphasis is on this element of natural beauty, although he 
seems to make a crude attempt to phrase something of 
romantic awe, but even here in terms of nature. There 
were faint 

wick. In recalling Beaudesert, "old Montfort's lofty seat," where 
he ranged in childhood, he was unable to merge his feeling for 
castles with his childish experiences. 

In the Ruins of Pontefract Castle (1756), Langhorne is ab- 
sorbed in the physical danger attendant upon walking or standing 
near ruined walls. The frightened peasant, who steps swiftly 
by, feels for himself only the same physical fear that prompts the 
"pale matron" to call her "heedless" children from the "threat- 
ening wall." Neither is moved by the spirit of awe that later 
writers connected with ruins. Joseph Warton's To Fancy contains 
a passage conceived in the same mood : 

Or to some abbey's mouldering towers, 
Where, to avoid cold wintry showers, 
The naked beggar shivering lies, 
While whistling tempests round her rise, 
And trembles lest the tottering wall 
Should on her sleeping infants fall. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 331 

Internal breezes, sobbings of the place 
And respirations, from the roofless walls 
The shuddering ivy dripped large drops. 

(Prelude, II, 122-124) 

In the use of specifically medieval elements in their in- 
fluence on childhood, Wordsworth, therefore, shows no ad- 
vance over previous poets. 

Before he reached the stage of poetic development which 
gave him power to phrase a vivid sense of mysterious awe, 
felt by him as an emanation from natural objects in wood 
or field, Wordsworth experimented with horrific elements 
that derive from Blair, the ballads, and the German school 
of horror. He refers in the Preface to "sickly and stupid 
German tragedies," but was himself temporarily under the 
sway of their methods in such a poem as The Thorn and 
his tragedy The Borderers. He was, as Professor Win- 
chester intimates, "influenced by the growing liking for the 
cruder forms of romance in drama and fiction at that period. 
Certainly some of the action and scenery of the play recall 
the bugaboo terrors of Horace Walpole or Monk Lewis." 

That Wordsworth set out in The Thorn (1798) to em- 
phasize the horrific element is clear both from his own pre- 
fatory remarks and from a comparison with Langhorne's 
lines on the thorn in The Country- Justice. In the choice of 
concrete details, Wordsworth's poem represents an extreme 
rebound from the classicist method. His intention was to 
make the commonplace seem unusual, the approach being 
by way of exhibiting "some of the general laws by which 
superstition acts upon the mind." 

Langhorne's thorn is solitary, aged, and torn by winds 
of the heath on which it stands exposed: Wordsworth's 
thorn is "aged," "old and grey," "a wretched thing forlorn," 
and stands "high on a mountain's highest ridge," exposed 



332 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

to "the stormy winter gale" that ''cuts Hke a scythe." 
Wordsworth has all the elements of Langhorne except the 
moonlight, which by Wordsworth is converted into the time 
when "frosty air is keen and still." He adds to the elements 
of the earlier poet a specific and concrete quality. Lang- 
horne proceeds at once to the "horror" which stopped a 
"felon in his flight." The horror is not supernatural, but 
is the result of lack of benevolence in a community put to 
shame by the tenderhearted felon whose sympathy is moved 
by the plight of the new-born infant found by him near 
the thorn and carried, in the face of personal danger, to the 
nearest cottage. The intention of Langhorne is to depict 
the workings of universal benevolence even in the heart of 
a man hunted by officials of organized society. Words- 
worth, on the other hand, crudely endeavors to motivate the 
supernatural by reference to the height of the thorn, which is 
Not higher than a two years' child. 

He emphasizes the distorted appearance of the wind-swept 
thorn, and takes out his measuring stick in order to report 
that the thorn is not five yards from the mountain path. He 
returns to what he considers the creepy style by calling at- 
tention to 

A beauteous heap, a hill of moss. 

Just half a foot in height, 

on which one may see "All colours that were ever seen." 
He singles out a deep vermilion, and in the next stanza 
speaks of "scarlet bright." 

This heap of earth o'ergrown with moss, 

Which close beside the Thorn you see, 

So fresh in all its beauteous dyes, 

Is like an infant's grave in size, 

As like as like can be : 

But never, never anywhere, 

An infant's grave was half so fair. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 333 

And when later he introduces the doleful Martha Ray, clad 
in *'a scarlet cloak," he does so by repeating the allusion 
to the infant's grave. She 

oft there sits between the heap, 
So like an infant's grave in size. 

In the ninth stanza he again summarizes his opening lines 
and refers once more to the "hillock like an infant's grave." 
As if this were finally adequate suggestion of something 
mysterious and gruesome, he enters upon the story of the 
girl's betrayal and the connection between her child and 
the thorn near which she often sat even in inclement 
weather. The childhood theme is realized with the same 
painful literalness as the poet's exact measurements. The 
physical horrors of blood stains on the moss of the child's 
grave are phrased with crude directness. That Words- 
worth was consciously working in the mood of the school of 
terror is clear from the way he incorporates graveyard 
horrors. 

Some say if to the pond you go. 

And fix on it a steady view, 

The shadow of a babe you trace, 

A baby and a baby's face, 

And that it looks at you; 

Whene'er you look on it, 'tis plain 

The baby looks at you again. 

As if this were not sufficient, he adds that the authorities 
who come to examine the hill of moss are frightened ofif by 
the heaving of the sod for fifty yards around. 

If the poem could be read as a travesty of the sort of 
thing Lewis stood for, it would be interesting; but Words- 
worth took the subject seriously, and the poem is painful 
even to the inner circle of Wordsworthians. It is interest- 
ing to note that the hillocks noticed in Blair's Grave include 
one ''of a span long," the resting place of a child that ''never 



334 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

saw the sun." In The Excursion, Wordsworth asks his 
reader to mark a daisied hillock "three spans long," a phrase 
which is compared by Mr. W. Knight with an identical 
phrase in Burger's Pfarrer's Tochter, from which Words- 
worth's phrase may have derived. The Thorn represents 
Wordsworth's fleeting interest in a phase of romantic poetry 
which is not congenial to his powers.^ 

He is at his best when he portrays in The Prelude, in 
connection with reminiscences of Hawkeshead days, the 
subtler influences that emanated from nature to teach the 
boy the mysterious power of a presence that can not be seen 
with the physical eye. He was one of a race of real children 
who went tired to bed from boisterous play. The glad 
animal spirits which made them healthy youngsters were, 
occasionally at least, supplemented in Wordsworth, even at 
the age of ten, by experiences of subtler origin. He wrote 
an epic of his boyish adventures 'Vhile yet a schoolboy." It 
was a long poem that included '*my own adventures, and the 
scenery of the country in which I was brought up." The 
earliest extant verses, ''written as a school exercise at 
Hawkeshead anno aetatis 14", contain these lines : 

To teach, on rapid wings, the curious soul 
To roam from heaven to heaven, from pole to pole, 
From thence to search the mystic cause of things 
And follow Nature to her secret springs; 

Nor less to guide the fluctuating youth 

Firm in the sacred paths of moral truth. 

Among the genuine boyish experiences recounted in The 
Prelude, that of the stolen boat ride reveals his sensitive- 
ness to the mysterious power emanating from nature. 

1 A Fragment (supposed to have been found in a dark passage 
in the Tower of London), by Miss Helen Maria Williams, is 
equally crude in its attempt to arouse sympathy for children mur- 
dered in the Tower. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 335 

Throughout the narrative there is a solid substratum of 
physical experience, of which he never loses sight, and out of 
which grew naturally his sense of "huge and mighty forms" 
that were a trouble to his dreams. 

By following the natural sequence of the boy's psycho- 
logical reactions to external phenomena, which are clearly 
visualized, he succeeds in expressing his vivid sense of the 
working of mysterious forces. Beyond the unobtrusive 
allusion to his little boat as an ''elfin pinnace," he makes no 
effort to add an element of the strange and extraordinary. 
The boy is enjoying a ''troubled pleasure" because he rea- 
lizes that the boat ride is "an act of stealth," but he is re- 
sponsive to the "small circles glittering idly in the moon" 
as he pulls lustily at the oars. To reach his chosen goal 
"with an unswerving line," he fixed his eye on the "summit 
of a craggy ridge" : 

I dipped my oars into the silent lake, 

And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat 

Went heaving throug-h the water like a swan; 

When, from behind that craggy steep till then 

The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, 

As if with voluntary power instinct 

Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, 

And growing still in stature the grim shape 

Towered up between me and the stars, and still, 

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own 

And measured motion like a living thing, 

Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned. 

And through the silent water stole my way 

Back to the covert of the willow tree; 

There in her mooring-place I left my bark, — 

And through the meadows homeward went, in grave 

And serious mood; but after I had seen 

That spectacle, for many days, my brain 

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense 

Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts 



336 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

There hung a darkness, call it solitude 

Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes 

Remained, no pleasant images of trees, 

Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; 

But huge and mighty forms, that do not live 

Like living men, moved slow^ly through my mind 

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams. 

(I, 374-400) 

As he looks back to this experience, Wordsworth breaks 
into a song of thanks to the "Wisdom and Spirit of the Uni- 
verse" which had purified his feelings and thoughts by 
bringing him into contact with enduring things. 

not in vain 
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn 
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me 
The passions that build up our human soul. 

(I, 404-407) 

Wordsworth's recollection of nocturnal visits to the 
snares set by his companions is interesting in the light of 
Blair's schoolboy in the graveyard. In Blair's Grave there 
is no motivation of the boy's fear beyond the superstitious 
awe commonly attributed to human beings who walk in 
country graveyards while moon shadows are projected 
across nettle-skirted and moss-covered stones. Blair holds 
to simple traditions of horrid apparitions that are tall and 
ghastly and take stand over some ''new-opened" grave. It 
is the sort of stufif out of which were made those ballads 
learned by country lads from their grandame at the ingle- 
side. Blair is in fact using material that could have been 
supplied him by almost any child in his parish in Scotland. 
Wordsworth, on the other hand, concentrates on the ordi- 
nary remorse which any boy would feel when alone in the 
woods at night after having emptied the snares set by school 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 337 

companions. The boy's better reason had been overpowered, 
and he had taken the bird which was the rightful prey of 
another. Ghosts did not pursue him. Wordsworth's art is 
not, as in The Thorn, identified with that of the fleshly 
school. He states the ordinary facts of the reaction of a 
guilty boy to his awakening conscience. He does this not 
in terms of eighteenth-century moralizing, but in phrasings 
that, while not destroying the physical reality of his en- 
vironment, permeate it with warning powers "of soft alarm." 
He spiritualizes the phenomena of nature. Blair's school- 
boy hears the sound of something purring at his heels, and 
then runs as fast as his legs will carry him. Wordsworth 
heard "low breathings coming after" of "undistinguishable 
motion," and steps that were as silent as the turf they 
trod. They are too subtle to be identified in terms of Blair's 
traditional graymalkin "purring" at a boy's heels. 

Wordsworth, then, is successful in conveying his sense 
of the mysterious when he holds closely to naturalistic ele- 
ments, and makes no effort to create agencies that are not in 
harmony with the manifestations of external nature. 

Where Blair is conventional in the manipulation of 
ghostly elements, Wordsworth identifies the mysterious 
with certain phenomena of external nature. He secures the 
desired effect by a high suggestion of something "more" 
than what was vouchsafed to descriptive poets. Words- 
worth's penetrative power goes deeper than externals : a 
yellow cowslip was "nothing more" than a yellow cowslip 
to Peter Bell, but flowers and the phenomena of woods and 
fields suggest higher powers to Wordsworth and give him 
thoughts that lie too deep for tears. ^ He again and again 
states his faith in the ministrations of nature, as in The 
Tables Turned (1798) : 

1 Compare Gray's Vicissitude. 



338 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 
Than all the sages can. 

Such a process is perfectly normal, for he emphasizes ele- 
mentary feelings ; and he accepts as a fact in his philosophy 
that "man and nature are essentially adapted to each other." 

HI 

By a ''faithful adherence to the truth of nature," which 
in Wordsworth's poetry means more than the literal external 
facts, he awakens civilized man from the "lethargy of cus- 
tom" by reference to powers to which any "feeling mind" 
may awaken itself if man will but be as simple and natural 
as a child. Wordsworth recognizes the beneficent supple- 
menting influence of man, especially as revealed in the affec- 
tionate teachings of a cottage mother; but he never omits 
the influence of nature on the child mind. 

poor men's children, they and they alone, 
By their condition taught, can understand 
The wisdom of the prayer that daily asks 
For daily bread. A consciousness is yours 
How feelingly religion may be learned 
In smoky cabins, from a mother's tongue — 
Heard while the dwelling vibrates to the din 
Of the contiguous torrent. (Excursion, IV, 786-793) 

In the light of this attitude it is only natural that when 
Wordsworth was thinking of the problem of immortality 
and met the little cottage girl in the area of Goodrich 
Castle in 1793, he should see in her simple faith a true ex- 
pression of the cottage child's spiritual instincts. He is not 
tempted to develop the graveyard background in the mood 
of Blair, nor does he drift into the sentimental sadness of 
Gray. He writes steadily with his eye on the object. In 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 339 

We Are Seven (1798) the cottage child has ceased to be 
treated as one of a group. In this detached poem Words- 
worth concentrates his attention upon her as an individual. 
He not only notes the details of her surroundings and do- 
mestic background, but individualizes her physically. His 
deep sympathy is plain also in the lines which analyze the 
probable reasons for the child's reaction to his questions. 
Where previous poets have not gone beyond the bounds of 
play and physical recreation, Wordsworth tries to penetrate 
to the innermost workings of the child mind. 

The untutored affection of childhood is reflected in her 
habits, which are true to child nature in the environment in 
which she is placed. Her implicit faith is naturally ex- 
pressed in the simple stanza of the folk ballad. All phases 
of Wordsworth's conception and expression are adapted to 
the portrayal of simple child nature. ^ 

Wordsworth ascribes to her all physical characteristics 
found in connection with the traditional poetic conception 
of idyllic cottage children, with the difference that he in- 
dividualizes her and allows her to appear as a vital, living 
being in the dialogue. He states her age precisely; curls 
clustered about her head. There is just a touch of ballad 
remoteness when he writes, in connection with her mystic 
woodland air, that she was "wildly clad." The romantic 
suggestion, in place of a more literal descriptive word, at 
once removes the child from the garish light of common 
experience, without, however, destroying physical reality. 
Her beauty, which made the poet glad, is enhanced by eyes 
that are "fair and very fair." 

1 He may have learned from Blake something of the elemen- 
tal effectiveness of the question and answer method, for some of 
the lines in We Are Seven seem to echo such a question as "Where 
are thy father and mother, say" of Blake's Chimney-Sweeper in 
Songs of Experience. 



340 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Then the dialogue commences, in which the poet is 
worsted by the little maid who will not concede that two of 
the family have been removed by death. The first stanza, 
in the composition of which Coleridge assisted, has pre- 
pared the reader to sympathize with her inability to com- 
prehend the idea of cessation of being. Wordsworth's 
analysis of child nature reveals a new element in poetry 
about children. Judged by the standards of creative art, 
the canon of Wordsworth's poetry reveals no greater 
achievement in the presentation of a cottage child. 

Blake's children live out the idea of vigor and vitality 
that can recognize no cessation of activity: Wordsworth's 
poem is conceived with characteristic tranquillity and repose. 
With simplicity and limpid clearness it illustrates Words- 
worth's philosophy. Here as elsewhere in his poetry about 
children, his interest is not like Blake's in the "childishness 
of childhood," for Wordsworth had a ''wondering, question- 
ing interest in the child mind," which is revealed especially 
in IVe Are Seven and in the lines to Hartley Coleridge. 

It is not necessary to justify the child psychology upon 
which Wordsworth proceeds in We Are Seven. It is be- 
side the point to argue about imaginary companions; or to 
say that children do not lie when they refer to imaginary 
playmates, but that their attitude is due to real confusion. 
It is unnecessary to speak of their vivid sense of reality in 
play-life, or of their failure to be conscious of the need of 
distinguishing between intensely real play moments and the 
world of external fact which, as Wordsworth says in th^. 
Ode, presses upon them later with a weight heavy as frost 
and deep almost as life. It is beside the point to consider 
these matters, because, although Wordsworth had something 
of the semblance of a philosophy about the relationship be- 
tween childhood and nature, he was out of sympathy with 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 341 

the scientific attitude which prompted a man to peep and 
botanize upon his mother's grave. He intuitively accepted 
a fact of common experience and illustrated it in the atti- 
tude of the child who unquestioningly accepts the fact in 
its full simplicity. 

Aside from the interest which the poem has ever com- 
manded as a perfect expression of one phase of childhood, 
it is of interest too as an early study that foreshadows 
Wordsworth's deep and instinctive faith in childhood as re- 
vealed in the Ode. In We Are Seven the child is individual- 
ized and realized as a human being at the same time that 
Wordsworth gives expression to his faith in the child's in- 
stinctive belief in immortality. 

Even Michael falls far behind this poem, although 
images of the infant Luke are flashed upon the reader. Luke 
acts naturally enough, and is truly conceived as a cottage 
child ; but the portrait lacks the full individualizing lines of 
We Are Seven both in externalities and in moral qualities. 
Luke is the victim of circumstances — fate, perhaps — and his 
reactions to events are pictured chiefly in terms of his 
father's experiences. Luke is neither morally nor physically 
at the center of the poem. Wordsworth's sympathy and 
analysis are centered in Michael. The expository Fenwick 
note recognizes the fact that much of the poem turns upon 
Michael's sheepfold, the erection of which was begun with 
the aid of Luke. In the return at eve, Luke, who has come 
home from the fields with his father, is not singled out. He 
sits down with his parents to the cleanly supper-board with 
its mess of pottage, skimmed milk, cheese, and basket "piled 
high with oaten cakes." And in the thrifty occupations of 
the evening hours, his activities are merged with the father's 
in the repair of utensils or in the carding of wool. After 
the first one hundred and fiftv lines, the child's activities 



342 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

are not presented In direct action, but in the recollection of 
Michael. 

The reader is gradually carried forward to the boy's 
eighteenth year, at which time unforeseen misfortunes fell 
upon Michael. At this point the affection for native fields 
determines Michael's choice of alternatives, and he decides 
to send his son into the great city in preference to selling a 
portion of his ''patrimonial fields." In the considerations 
that lead up to Michael's decision, Luke plays no active part. 
He is not pictured as in any way actively guiding or reliev- 
ing the moral anguish of his father. Michael alone makes 
the decision. 

Our Luke shall leave us, Isabel ; the land 
Shall not go from us, and it shall be free; 
We shall possess it, free as is the wind 
That passes over it. 

It would be shallow to derive the pathetic scenes at the 
close of Michael from sentimental poetry of the previous 
century. The sentimental tradition may be felt in certain 
lines of The Brothers, but in the simple affection of Michael 
we feel the heart-beats of a father and mother who must 
part with their only child, and who, with dread, consign him 
to the keeping of a distant relative in a wicked city. Even 
at the close of the poem, after the fatal blow has fallen 
upon him, and he realizes that his son is lost to him, Michael 
does not lose heart, but resolves at the age of eighty-four 
to climb the heights once more. It was not sentiment that 
prompted the laying of the first stone at the sheepfold which 
was never completed, although the old man spent many an 
hour there after Luke had left him. To Michael the laying 
of the stone was a covenant between father and son. 

Wordsworth's exaltation of cottage children involves a 
fuller and more affectionate notice of the English cottage 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 343 

than is found in poetry of the eighteenth century. On the 
basis of his poetry it is possible to reconstruct the background 
and activities of cottage children. He notices how cottage 
windows blaze through the twilight in the frosty season ; 
he gives details of the peat fire; he notices the frugal fare 
of cottage children. 

And three fair Children, plentifully fed 
Though simply, from their little household farm. 

{Excursion, VII, 162-163) 

He depicts the sad home coming of Margaret, Goody Blake 
gathering faggots, and like Thomson loves to muse by the 
half-kitchen, half-parlor fire in his cottage. The cottage 
and cottage children lie at the heart of his conception of life. 
After the disillusionment following closely upon Eng- 
land's declaration of war against the France which for him 
still stood for the spirit of freedom, and after his loss of 
faith in France itself because of Revolutionary excesses, he 
was wooed back to nature and cottage simplicity by Dorothy. 
Up to the time ''Britain opposed the Liberties of France" he 
recognized a continuous development from childhood to 
manhood : 

In brief, a Child of Nature, as at first. 

Diffusing only those affections wider 

That from the cradle had grown up with me, 

And loving, in no other way than light 

Is lost in light, the weak in the more strong. 

( Prelude, XI, 168-172) 

In the period of readjustment at Racedown (1795-1797) 
his love of cottage life slowly reasserted itself, at Alfoxden 
(1797-1798) he wrote his homely lyrical ballads, and while 
in Germany composed beautiful lines about the unidentified 
cottage girl in the Lucy poems. Upon his return from 
Germany, when he instinctively turned in 1799 toward his 



344 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

native fields among the Lakes, he settled at Dove Cottage, 
which is today the shrine peculiarly associated with his name. 
In The Recluse he acknowledged that many other nooks of 
earth have the attraction of Grasmere, but nowhere else 

can be found 
The one sensation that is here; 'tis here, 
Here as it found its way into my heart 
In childhood. 

In The Prelude, he recalled at length his own simple ex- 
periences among cottagers of the Lake District, from which 
he had been absent less than a decade. 

Those poems which are most valued today were con- 
ceived in harmony with the moods and ideals to which he 
gave full expression in The Prelude. He saw in children 
the manifestations which had won him back to nature and 
self after the moral crisis of the nineties. With childhood 
he associated all that is beautiful and ennobling in life. In 
childhood man lives closest to nature, and it was his firm 
belief that England could be saved only if Englishmen would 
live simply in communion with nature. His interest in nature 
and children was not that of an esthete; he was a humani- 
tarian who inherited the ethical interest of the benevolists 
from Thomson to Southey. 

After his meeting with Michael Beaupuy, whose con- 
versation had stirred him to the depths, nature yielded first 
place to man. While in France, he had been moved to com- 
passion by examples of suffering among the cottage poor, 
for the amelioration of whose condition such men as Beau- 
puy were striving. Wordsworth's sturdy democratic spirit 
resented class privilege with its resultant abuses, which were 
manifest in monarchical France. Awakened to social con- 
sciousness, he was keenly alive to suffering, and characteris- 
tically made his point by way of childhood. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 345 

When we chanced 
One day to meet a hunger-bitten girl, 
Who crept along fitting her languid gait 
Unto a heifer's motion, by a cord 
Tied to her arm, and picking thus from the lane 
Its sustenance, while the girl with pallid hands 
Was busy knitting in a heartless mood 
Of solitude, and at the sight my friend 
In agitation said, " 'Tis against that 
That we are fighting," I with him believed 
That a benignant spirit was abroad 
Which might not be withstood, that poverty 
Abject as this would in a little time 
Be found no more, that we should see the earth 
Unthwarted in her wish to recompense 
The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil, 
All institutes forever blotted out 
That legalised exclusion, empty pomp 
Abolished, sensual state and cruel power. 
Whether by edict of the one or few ; 
And finally, as sum and crown of all. 
Should see the people having a strong hand 
In framing their own laws ; whence better days 
To all mankind. {Prelude, IX, 509-532) 

In those early days of Revolutionary enthusiasm he still 
beheved in the fallacious doctrine that mankind could be re- 
formed by legislation. This attitude resulted in temporary 
disillusionment and the moral crisis from which he emerged 
with a sound conviction that the highest hopes for man lay 
in the individual; and because the child is father of the 
man, in the child. By way of the child, then, especially in 
its domestic relations, and in the duties of the state toward 
children in elementary education, he delivered his message. 

While Dorothy was winning him back to himself at 
Racedown, where he did not find a sturdy and independent 
peasantry such as is reflected in Michael, he saw what pained 
him and was in keeping with the background of Guilt and 



346 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Sorrow; or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain (i 791 -1794). 
The widow with her children in Guilt and Sorrow is effec- 
tively dramatized, and his indignation is aroused by the 
father who had been provoked by a ''simple freak of thought- 
less play" to beat his child cruelly. In the critical years of 
his life, when the poet in him lay in the balance, Words- 
worth was stirred by the humanitarian spirit that had per- 
vaded English poetry for over half a century before 1795. 

In keeping with his strong local feeling and his centri- 
petal nature, which loved to soar but not to roam, he as- 
sociated heaven and home as kindred points. In fact, his 
deep feeling for childhood implies a high conception of 
home virtues. Like the poets before him, he exalted moth- 
erhood and the place of the mother with her children in the 
home. He would have accepted the old English proverb 
that a good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters, and 
certainly wrote in the spirit of Lord Langdale, who said, *'If 
the world were put into one scale, and my mother into the 
other, the world would kick the beam." 

His is not a blind devotion. He saw his mother clearly 
and truly as a human mother. He is like the benevolist poets 
in that he could not follow naturalistic philosophy in all its 
implications. Wordsworth had read Shaftesbury, and re- 
marked that he was ''An author, at present unjustly depre- 
ciated." He was influenced by Rousseau and the return to 
nature, and his humanitarian thesis involved much of what 
in the native English tradition had been developed on the 
assumption of natural goodness. He wrote in The Prelude 
that evil is but a shade of good, a statement which re- 
flects the doctrines of sentimental comedy and domestic 
tragedy. He did not, however, logically apply those na- 
turalistic implications involved in the exaltation of primitive 
life as represented, for instance, by the American Indian. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 347 

Although not expressing himself in the crude manner of 
Day, he yet harbored no illusions about primeval purity in 
savafres. In the Hnes to his infant Dora he draws a com- 

o 

parison unfavorable to Indian life. In the course of his 
musings he reveals the essentials of his attitude toward 
motherhood by recognizing the value of culture and the 
graces of civilization. In the Indian mother 

the maternal sympathy itself, 
Though strong, is, in the main, a joyless tie 
Of naked instinct, wound about the heart. 

(Address to my Infant Daughter, Dora) 

In the exaltation of his mother he thought of more than 
creature comforts, which occupy so large a place in Cow- 
per's recollection. The essentially spiritual and freedom- 
loving Wordsworth praised his mother for her wise self- 
restraint in allowing a higher freedom than could be en- 
joyed by children who were subjected to meddling and 
"improvement." 

Motherhood is at the center of two of his most vital 
passages: one in The Prelude when he recollects his own 
mother and her influence on his childhood ; and the other in 
The Excursion when he makes a plea for the natural rights 
of children who are deprived of a mother's influence because 
an industrial age usurps her time and saps her energy. 

Although Cowper's poem on his mother excels in finality 
of expression, Wordsworth's lines are of the highest value 
in a study taking into account the social as well as the 
literary influences that mould a poet and determine his 
attitude toward childhood. 'Wordsworth responded obvi- 
ously to the new forces that had as their aim the ameliora- 
tion of childhood. His attitude towards his mother and 
her care of him reveals his fundamental understanding of 
child welfare in what is on the whole the modern concep- 
tion. 



348 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Although not published until 1850, the year of his death, 
The Prelude, or The Grozvth of a Poet's Mind; an Autobio- 
graphical Poem, was begun at the opening of the year 1799, 
and was completed in the summer of 1805. During these 
years, moral tales and systems of education, both native 
and imported, were still in vogue. Among the really val- 
uable English schemes that helped to point the way to a 
system of popular education in 1878 were those of Lan- 
caster and Bell, sponsored in 1798, and flourishing side by 
side. The real difference between these systems was that 
Lancaster proceeded on a wholly secular basis, while Bell 
espoused the education of children in religion as well, and 
finally received the organized support of the "National So- 
ciety for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the 
Principles of the Established Church throughout England 
and Wales." Side by side with these genuine and, for 
their time, successful efforts, and in many cases antedat- 
ing them, were the amateur systems which had sprung 
up as the result of the Rousseau impetus in Germany 
and France. These were rapidly taken up in England by 
the wniters of moral tales, and by amateur authors on educa- 
tion, and were transplanted in translations like those of 
Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Holcroft. 

In view of Wordsworth's pronunciamento on the evil 
results of industry in its interference with the inborn right 
of children to a free, open-air childhood, and in view of his 
attitude on the native nobility of nature's gentlemen as rep-* 
resented in the ideal peasant who enjoyed true freedom, it 
was to be expected that he would be out of sympathy with 
cramping and cramming systems that failed to catch the 
spirit of freedom essential to his philosophy of life with 
respect to children. Although he was not specifically a 
follower of Rousseau, his doctrine of the minimum of in 
terference, restraint, and guidance is in practical guise some- 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 349 

thing very much Hke Rousseau's behef that with the child 
one should not gain' time but lose it. Like Rousseau, 
Wordsworth was not concerned with making a man of the 
child as soon as possible; he believed that the child should 
live the days of childhood for what they are rather than, 
as in the institutional system, wholly from a regard for 
what they promise for the future. Like Rousseau, then, 
and Blake, he recognized the individuality of the period of 
childhood, and respected it. The child was to be allowed to 
roam at will in books, but especially in nature, which is 
the breath of God. There he would experience true life. 
(Excursion, II, 28ff.) 

Wordsworth has been frequently misunderstood as con- 
demning, or at least belittling, the influence of books. As 
a matter of fact, he was with Dorothy a persistent reader 
of English poetry. Although recognizing the superior in- 
fluence of nature, he was led to take an unfavorable atti- 
tude toward books only in so far as they were misused in 
the schools and amateur systems of home education. It is 
necessary for a true conception to realize that he does not 
belittle books, to which he is more than just. He believes 
that they have profoundly influenced the heart of man, 
''whether by native prose of numerous verse," from the lofty 
notes of Homer to the ''low and wren-like wafblings" and 
ballads for common folk. Although he has many times 
spoken of the value and delights of reading, perhaps the 
most significant passage occurs in The Prelude. 

'Tis just that in behalf of these, the works, 
A.nd of the men that framed them, whether known, 
Or sleeping nameless in their scattered graves, 
That I should here assert their rights, attest 
Their honours, and should, once for all, pronounce 
^ Their benediction ; speak of them as Powers 

For ever to be hallowed. (V, 213-219) 



350 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Wordsworth's objection is wholly to the confinement 
of children to books and systems of reading that exclude 
enjoyment and delight in the works of nature. He asks how 
he and Coleridge would have developed into poets if in 
lieu of wandering at will through vales and over open 
ground 

We had been followed, hourly watched, and noosed. 

Each in his several melancholy walk 

Stringed like a poor man's heifer at its feed, 

Led through the lanes in forlorn servitude. (V, 238-241) 

His scorn and contempt for the model child are ex- 
pressed at length. lEarly trained to worship seemliness and 
convention, this child is never known to quarrel. Words- 
worth condemns the sickly humanitarianism of the child 
that with ''gifts bubbles o'er as generous as a fountain." 
Such a child is never selfish, and no childish pleasure can 
ever tempt him. The wandering beggars ''propagate his 
name," and dumb creatures find him "tender as a nun." 

To enhance the wonder, see 
How arch his notices, how nice his sense 
Of the ridiculous; not blind is he 
To the broad follies of the licensed world, 
Yet innocent himself withal, though shrewd. 
And can read lectures upon innocence. 

(V, 309-314) 

The products of fashionable systems were far from repre- 
senting the ideal freedom which was advocated by Rousseau 
and Wordsworth, and which Wordsworth in his abnormal 
love of freedom in his youth carried so far that his hatred 
of restraint caused him to "turn from regulations even of 
my own." The cramming process then in vogue produced 
infant prodigies who in his eyes were little monstrosities. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 351 

A miracle of scientific lore, 

Ships he can guide across the pathless sea, 

And tell you all their cunning; he can read 

The inside of the earth, and spell the stars; 

He knows the policies of foreign lands; 

Can string you names of districts, cities, towns. 

The whole world over, tight as beads of dew 

Upon a gossamer thread ; he sifts, he weighs ; 

All things are put to question ; he must live 

Knowing that he grows wiser every day 

Or else not live at all, and seeing too 

Each little drop of wisdom as it falls 

Into the dimpling cistern of his heart. (V, 315-327) 

Wordsworth's heart goes out to the child, who is not to 
be blamed : 

For this unnatural growth the trainer blame, 
Pity the tree. 

Wordsworth could not endure violence to child nature, 
and like Blake rebelled against interference with the sanc- 
tity of childhood. The child could have no freedom in one 
of the systems devised for his education : 

For, ever as a thought of purer birth 

Rises to lead him toward a better clime, 

Some intermeddler still is on the watch 

To drive him back, and pound him, like a stray, 

Within the pinfold of his own conceit. (V, 332-336) 

Meanwhile Mother Earth is grieved to find that all the 
playthings she had designed for her child are unthought 
of; the flowers in their woodland beds mourn the absence 
of children, and the banks of rivers are lonely without 
roving youngsters. 

What would we not sacrifice for a glimpse of Words- 
worth, Coleridge, and Lamb (for they had grown up in the 
days of chap books and Newberry's volumes, before moral 



352 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

tales had cast their blight) about a table discussing the 
pernicious effects of misdirected efforts in contemporary 
education. They scorned ''These mighty workmen of our 
later age" who have the skill to manage books and things 
so as to make them act on infant minds ''as surely as the sun 
Deals with a flower." These people have set up as guides 
and wardens of men's minds, and are sages who "in their 
prescience would control All accidents," and confine men 
to the road which they have built. Wordsworth, in despair, 
wishes to know if their presumption will ever allow them 
to learn that a wiser spirit is at work for man. Words- 
worth and his friends must often have exchanged reminis- 
cences of those happier early days for children when the 
curse of encyclopedic knowledge had not operated. He 
longed for the days of imaginative, freedom-giving fairy 
tales and stories of wonder. 

Oh ! give us once again the wishing-cap 
Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat 
Of Jack the Giant-Killer, Robin Hood, 
And Sabra in the forest with St. George! 

(V, 341-344) 

He does not hold back the reason for his preference : 

The child, whose love is here, at least, doth reap 
One precious gain, that he forgets himself. 

In this connection he paid the memorable tribute to his 
"honoured Mother," who died when he was only eight. He 
feels that to "break upon the sabbath of her rest" in con- 
nection with his condemnation of systems is almost blas- 
phemous. He would not link her memory "With any 
thought that looks at others' blame." She typifies the es- 
sence of that beneficent influence which shielded him from 
subjection to amateur systems and novelties in education. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 353 

She respected the character of her children. She did not, 
Hke many mothers at the close of the century, presumptu- 
ously arrogate the power of close supervision. 

Nor did by habit of her thoughts mistrust 

Our nature, but had virtual faith that He 

Who fills the mother's breast with innocent milk, 

Doth also for our nobler part provide, 

Under His great correction and control, 

As innocent instincts, and as innocent food; 

Or draws for minds that are left free to trust 

In the simplicities of opening life 

Sweet honey out of spurned or dreaded weeds. 

This was her creed, and therefore she was pure 

From anxious fear of error or mishap. 

And evil, overweeningly so called ; 

Was not puffed up by false unnatural hopes, 

Nor selfish with unnecessary cares, 

Nor with impatience from the season asked 

More than its timely produce ; rather loved 

The hours for what they are, than from regard 

Glanced on their promises in restless pride. 

Such was she — not from faculties more strong 

Than others have, but from the times, perhaps, 

And spot in which she lived, and through a grace 

Of modest meekness, simple-mindedness, 

A heart that found benignity and hope, 

Being itself benign. (V, 270-293) 

As in Blake's conception, all knowledge should be de- 
Hght, which in Wordsworth's interpretation is to be found 
in the presence of enduring things in nature. He exalts his 
mother for giving the early freedom that brought him into 
the presence of nature, where infant sensibility might be 
augmented and sustained in freedom, the ''great birthright 
of our being." ^ 

1 Victor Hugo looked back to his mother with affection be- 
cause she had rescued him from the irksome confinement of the 
grammar school. 



354 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Wordsworth recognizes the same beneficent freedom 
from restraint in his second mother, the school at Hawkes- 
head, where he was not closely held to routine. He notes 
that the scholars might have fed upon a fatter soil of arts 
and letters, but says, "be that forgiven," for they had gained 
knowledge without loss of power. At Cambridge he found 
himself ill prepared for ''sedentary peace" and academic dis- 
cipline. He never read for honors, and in choosing a walk- 
ing tour through the Alps during his third summer vaca- 
tion was guilty of a "hardy slight" of college studies and 
their rewards. 

For I, bred up mid Nature's luxuries, 

Was a spoiled child, and rambling like the wind, 

As I had done in daily intercourse 

With those crystalline rivers, solemn heights, 

And mountains, ranging like a fowl of the air, 

I was ill-tutored for captivity. (Ill, 351-356) 

To him, confinement to courses stood for instruction, while 
freedom for play of the senses and sensibilities in fields and 
woods stood for education. 

Although not definitely correlating play and study in 
the curriculum, Wordsworth did insist on the right to 
freedom from supervision and control in order to liberate 
the child for the natural guidance of woods and streams. 
It is significant that he named the two first books of The 
Prelude not "School" but "School-time." In his poetry, 
play is in fact raised to the level of an educational force. 
By play he means rougher sports such as are chronicled in 
The Prelude; but he means also such subtler experiences 
as he reported in the snaring of the woodcock, climbing to 
the raven's nest, and skating on Esthwaite. In his explicit 
recognition of the value of play he crystallizes the thought 
of Lovibond, Bruce, and Mickle, who recognized play as a 
factor in character building. Unlike them, Wordsworth 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 355 

has developed his attitude in expository passages attendant 
upon poetic representation of his autobiographical exper- 
iences. Gay as a boy in Devonshire, and Langhorne in the 
Lake District, had certainly enjoyed many of the sports re- 
corded by Wordsworth. The time, however, had not been 
ripe for the definite statement of an attitude holding that 
children were not uselessly employed in the changes of sea- 
sonal exercise or play which the year brings "in his de- 
lightful round." Wordsworth's modern attitude is clearly 
phrased in the Duddon sonnet in which after a typical en- 
comium on streams as companions for children, he writes. 

Nor have I tracked their course for scanty gains ; 
They taught me random cares and truant joys, 
That shield from mischief and preserve from stains 
Vague minds, while men are growing out of boys. 

(The River Duddon, 26) 

This is in harmony with his belief that the child's mind 
should not show too many traces of the handiwork of man, 
whose meddling and systematizing would straighten the 
windings of the Duddon and the Derwent. 

Wordsworth stands for natural development with a 
minimum of interference. Modern study of child psycho- 
logy indicates that his conception was not merely idealistic. 
Scientific observation has made clear the need of broad 
sense experience for the young child, because, being es- 
sentially sensory and motor, his life is made up largely of 
percepts. He responds with chameleon rapidity to his 
environment; every object appeals to his senses; there is 
no mixture or confusion of motives to prevent him from 
trying to realize the physical concomitants that awaken and 
appeal to his emotions. The most widely accepted authori- 
ty holds that the mature man's proficiency in the manipula- 
tion of more complex mental states is directly dependent 



356 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

on the richness, clearness, and breadth of the child's early 
sense perceptions. This is the attitude of Wordsworth in 
the passages which lovingly recall rosy-cheeked school- 
boys, the oldest of whom was no taller than a counsellor's 
bag — who listened to the cuckoo and felt the presence of 
an unknown power. Wordsworth pitied the boy Coleridge, 
who was compelled to spend his school days "in the depths 
of the huge city" where he was restricted in his view of na- 
ture to the "leaded roof of that wide edifice, thy school and 
home." 

His most extended exposition occurs in the fervid lines 
of The Prelude in which he calls that babe blessed who is 
nursed in its mother's arms and "with his soul Drinks in 
the feelings of his Mother's eye." 

For him, in one dear Presence, there exists 

A virtue which irradiates and exalts 

Objects through widest intercourse of sense. 

(II, 238-240) 

Such a child is not bewildered or depressed. The hand of 
love beautifies all natural objects to which as a babe he is 
too weak to do more than point. Having drunk from 
love's purest earthly fount of tenderness, such a child clear- 
ly feels pity for whatever is unsightly or bears the marks 
of violence and harm. Such a babe, growing up under 
such influences, is not an ideal : 

Emphatically such a Being lives. 

Frail creature as he is, helpless as frail. 

An inmate of this active universe! 

For feeling has to him imparted power 

That through the growing faculties of sense 

Doth like an agent of the one great Mind 

Create, creator and receiver both, 

Working but in alliance with the works 

Which it beholds. (II, 252-260) 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 357 

This first true spirit of man's life, clearly manifest in 
the natural child, is abated or suppressed by convention, 
"By uniform control of after years." The loss which he 
indicates in The Prelude, and bemoans in the Ode, repre- 
sents a true experience that can be explained by modern 
psychology. It teaches that in place of the child's indis- 
criminate observation, the man tends to focalize his interest 
along certain definite lines. The man thereby loses his 
childish spontaneous joy in the consciously controlled ef- 
forts and responses of maturity. In order, therefore, that 
the child may enjoy his heaven-sent harmony with God's 
creation as fully as possible, Wordsworth would eliminate 
much of the outside interference of instruction which 
falsely goes under the name of education. ^ He is con- 
vinced at heart, and makes the point again and again. 

How little those formalities, to which 

With overweening trust alone we give 

The name of Education, have to do 

With real feeling and just sense. (XIII, 169-172) 

His philosophy of child delight and happiness, which is 
essentially that of Blake also, but fully and consciously de- 
veloped, is explained by his temperamental love and ex- 
altation of simple dalesmen. In them the tutorings of na- 
ture, untrammeled by convention, have preserved a child- 
like spirit of love and reverence for natural objects. These 
are the teachings of The Prelude. 



1 Compare his lines on Cambridge. The Prelude, Book II, 11. 
591-608, but especially : 

And blind Authority beating with his staff 
The child that might have led him. 



358 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

In The Excursion (1815) the earlier, supple, naturalistic 
attitude, still close to Shaftesbury and Rousseau in spirit 
at least, has lost some of its freshness and charm in the 
matter-of-fact atmosphere that permeates the long exposi- 
tory passages on questions of public interest. 

Even before the completion of The Prelude, at the time 
when his thoughts were occupied with recollections of his 
own childhood, he often assumed a didactic manner that is 
remotely suggestive of the moral tales. The didactic Anec- 
dote for Fathers had been published in 1798; but during 
the year 1802, when he composed many beautiful lines on 
childhood, including the well-known "Rainbow," he also 
wrote Foresight. This little poem is delightfully con- 
ceived, but mechanically expressed. He had approached 
too closely to the bald didacticism of the moral-tale writers 
to follow his inspiration freely. The subtitle, "the charge 
of a child to his younger companion," which was later dis- 
carded, indicates the didactic spirit in which he was work- 
ing. The subject matter is botanical, and the moral smacks, 
if not of what Leigh Hunt called ''sordid and merely plod- 
ding morals," of the thrift and reward morality. ^ It dif- 
fers from moral tales in that there is a certain indefinable 

1 Compare Dorothy's Loving and Liking (1832) : 
Yet, listen, Child — I would not preach; 
But only give some plain directions 
To guide your speech and your affections. 

See also The Poet's Dream and The Longest Day. 

Compare To a Young Lady on her Birth-Day, Being the First 
of April, anonymously printed in A Classical Arrangement of Fu- 
gitive Poetry, vol. XV, p. 49: 

Let others write for bye-designs, 

I seek some moral in my lines, 

Which whosoever reads must bear, 

Or great, or learned, or young, or fair. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 359 

charm in the dialogue of the children who are out in the 
fields in early spring. 

With his customary dependence on Dorothy's diary, he 
capitalized her regret over having plucked a strawberry- 
blossom in January. He was stimulated by her remark 
that as a child she would never have pulled a strawberry- 
blossom. That very day he came in with the poem, known 
in the household as "Children Gathering Flowers." The 
charge of the elder child is dramatically conceived. 

That is a work of waste and ruin — 

Do as Charles and I are doing! 

Strawberry-blossoms, one and all, 

We must spare them — ^here are many : 

Look at it — the flower is small, 

Small and low, though fair as any. 

The child's insistence on the difference in age reveals 
Wordsworth's ability and willingness to weave a common 
trait of child nature into his poem : 

Do not touch it ! summers two 
I am older, Anne, than you. 

By avoiding the negative suggestion, Wordsworth con- 
ceived the elder child as a true monitor who centers the 
younger child's attention on other flowers. 

Pull the primrose, sister Anne ! 

Pull as many as you can. 

— Here are daisies, take your fill ; 

Pansies, and the cuckoo-flower : 

Of the lofty daffodil 

Make your bed, or make your bower; 

Fill your lap, and fill your bosom; 

Only spare the strawberry-blossom ! 

Then he enters upon a train of thought that leads to the 
moral of the poem. 



360 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

God has given a kindlier power 

To the favoured srtrawberry-flo\ver. 

Hither soon as spring is fled 

You and Charles and I will walk ; 

Lurking berries, ripe and red, 

Then will hang on every stalk, 

Each within its leafy bower; 

And for that promise spare the flower ! 

Nature alone, then, is not sufficient. Her tutorings 
need ito be supplemented. By the time he published The 
Excursion, he had awakened to the need of popular edu- 
cation. His vision of a system of state education for chil- 
dren marks him as a pioneer poet among those men of 
letters who appreciated the need of universal education. He 
appealed to church and state to realize their responsibilities 
in the education of children. His extended notice of edu- 
cational problems, and the obvious sincerity of his inten- 
tion, must have had an appreciable effect on the ever-widen- 
ing circle of his readers. 

Elementary education in England was dependent upon 
local initiative, and was supplemented by the philanthropical 
work of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowl- 
edge, and by the Sunday School. There is no doubt that 
these efforts, together with the monitorial systems of Lan- 
caster and Bell, paved the way for universal education. But 
the state had uniformly neglected its responsibilities, and it 
was not until eighteen years after Wordsworth had called 
attention to the needs of elementary education that the first 
Parliamentary grant was made in 1833. The grant of 
twenty thousand pounds, designed solely to aid in building 
schoolhouses, had to be passed as a supply bill, which was 
not required to go to the House of Lords, where as pro- 
gressive legislation it would have been killed. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 361 

In the course of vital discussion which is recorded in 
the eighth book of The Excursion, the Wanderer touched 
upon the failure of state and church to realize their duties 
in the education of children. He took his illustration from 
the Lake District, where children were more favorably 
situated than in most counties of England. He drew an 
unpleasant picture of the stiff-legged, awkward ploughboy 
under whose shaggy brow are set sluggish and lustreless 
eyes 

Proclaiming boldly that they never drew 

A look or motion of intelligence 

From infant-conning of the Christ-cross-row, 

Or puzzling through a primer, line by line, 

Till perfect mastery crown the pains at last. 

{Excursion, VIII, 411-415) 

The state had neglected him, and what can now penetrate 
the crust in which his soul sleeps "like a caterpillar sheathed 
in ice." He has not partaken of the equal rights that are 
boasted in his country's name. These lines indicate clearly 
that Wordsworth was not blinded by his conception of an 
ideal peasantry, but noticed the problem of popular educa- 
tion as faced by Hannah More in the dreadful conditions at 
rural Cheddar. 

The pHght of children was, however, worse in cities, 
where an inventive age had converted at "social Industry's 
command," peaceful hamlets or tracts of wood into teem- 
ing industrial centers. Here the abodes of men are irre- 
gularly massed as thickly as trees in a forest: 

crazy huts 
And tottering hovels, whence do issue forth 
A ragged Offspring. (VIII, 346-348) 

Here the "smoke of unremitting fires Hangs permanent." 
Wordsworth writes of the "deformities of crowded life." 
In place of the ancient, peaceful starry night that gave re- 



362 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

pose to man, he sees an ''unnatural light" that shines from 
a huge many-windowed factory where labor never ceases. 
In place of the curfew, man hears the harsh bell that 
punctually calls to unceasing toil. As the day laborers are 
disgorged, the night shift enters to the rumbling sound of 
''dizzy wheels" : 

Men, maidens, youths, 
Mother and little children, boys and girls. 
Enter, and each the wonted task resumes 
Within this temple, where is offered up 
To Gain, the master idol of the realm, 
Perpetual sacrifice. (VIII, 180-185) 

Wordsworth does not rest in a sentimental contrast be- 
tween the worship in this temple and that of his ancestors in 
vast cathedral or conventual church where tapers burned 
day and night in honor of God alone. He does not stop with 
a condemnation of the profane rites at the altar of gain, or 
the desecration of streams turned into "instruments of 
bane" to tempt those from simplicity whose ancestors drank 
pure water from them. !He turns to face a real problem 
which arose with the factory life that broke up the home. 
In the neighborhood of factories, homes are empty from 
morning to evening. 

The Mother left alone, — no helping hand 

To rock the cradle of her peevish babe ; 

No daughters round her, busy at the wheel, 

Or in dispatch of each day's little growth 

Of household occupation ; no nice arts 

Of needle-work; no bustle at the fire. 

Where once the dinner was prepared with pride. 

(VIII, 267-273) 

Nothing is left of domestic bliss to speed the day or cheer 
the mind. Wordsworth has phrased here an outHne of the 
problem which enlightened men and women are still hoping 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 363 

to solve. Wordsworth's interest is altogether focused on 
children who are deprived of their birthright because econo- 
mists contend that the state thrives by child labor — ' an 
"unfeeling thought." ^ He calls the doctrine "false as 
monstrous." He would banish wisdom that forces upon the 
child, because of "premature necessity," work that shuts 
off development of mind and heart, and makes "its very 
spring a season of decay" by "long captivity" and "inward 
chains" unworthy of a native Briton, and imposed "with- 
out his own consent." 

In Humanity (1829) Wordsworth is impatient with 
those who defend "qualified oppression" on the "hollow 
plea of recompense." Such arguments are 

Fetched widi cupidity from heartless schools, 

That to an Idol, falsely called "the Wealth 

Of Nations," sacrifice a People's health, 

Body and mind and soul; a thirst so keen 

Is ever urging on the vast machine 

Of sleepless Labour, 'mid whose dizzy wheels 

The Power least prized is that which thinks and feels. 

Wordsworth had not lost his early enthusiasm, and ad- 
hered to his high vision for the welfare of man as the in- 
heritor of that happiness which comes only through living in 
harmony with nature. The late poem To the Utilitarians 
(1833) is characterized by the same spirit which informs his 
plea for imagination in the education and reading matter of 
children. 

Avaunt this economic rage ! 
What would it bring ?^ — an iron age, 
Where Fact with heartless search explored 
Shall be Imagination's Lord, 

1 Compare the remark imputed to Pitt, who is said to have 
dismissed a delegation of complaining factory owners with the 
words, "Take the children." 



364 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

And sway with absolute control 
The god-like Functions of the Soul. 
Not thus can knowledge elevate 
Our Nature from her fallen state. 
With sober Reason Faith unites 
To vindicate the ideal rights 
Of human-kind — the tone agreeing 
Of objects with internal seeing, 
Of efforts with the end of Being. 

His objection is not to industry itself. But Wordsworth 
would have men go back to the cottage industry which kept 
children affectionately under the eye of parents. The 
simple life of cottagers was ever in his thoughts. From his 
poetry may be culled passages that would reconstruct a 
complete picture of spinning and weaving in the cottage. 
The Brothers (1800) provides such details: 

Upon the stone 
His wife sate near him, teasing matted wool. 
While, from the twin cards toothed with glittering wire, 
He fed the spindle of his youngest child. 
Who, in the open air, with due accord 
Of busy hands and back-and-forward steps, 
Her large round wheel was turning. 1 

His heart is in the lines from one of the Lucy poems ( 1799) : 

And she I cherished turned her wheel 
Beside an English fire. 

This attitude Hes at the root of his faith in the simple life 
as the hope of man. When he observes the terrible condi- 
tions of child labor at industrial centers, he cries out against 
those who seek to justify their preference for these condi- 
tions in place of the traditional home industry that had been 
carried on in a happy England. 

1 Compare The Excursion (Book I, 1. 890) : 'The little child 
who sate to turn the wheel." 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 365 

The Father, if perchance he still retain 

His old employments, goes to field or wood, 

No longer led or followed by the Sons ; 

Idlers perchance they were, — but in his sight ; 

Breathing fresh air, and treading the green earth; 

'Till their short holiday of childhood ceased. 

Ne'er to return ! That birthright now is lost. 

Economists will tell you that the State 

Thrives by the forfeiture — unfeeling thought. 

And false as monstrous! Can the mother thrive 

By the destruction of her innocent sons 

In whom a premature necessity 

Blocks out the forms of nature, preconsumes 

The reason, famishes the heart, shuts up 

The infant Being in itself, and makes 

Its very spring a season of decay! (VIII, 276-291) 

Wordsworth was justified in his condemnation of in- 
dustrial abuses involving the evils of child labor. The First 
Factory Act of 1802, the "Health and Morals of Apprentice 
Act," was designed to protect children who were herded 
into woolen mills. ^ It limited work to twelve hours a day, 
stipulated that night work was to cease after 1804, and con- 
tained certain provisions about elementary education in the 
three R's. Whitewash alone, however, would not atone for 
unsanitary conditions, and the limitation of work to twelve 
hours merely reflects the terrible conditions under which 
children labored. It was not until after The Excursion 
that a more extensive act prohibited employment of chil- 
dren under nine. This act again justifies Wordsworth's de- 
nunciation of conditions as they existed during the com- 
position of The Prelude and The Excursion. In spite of the 
earlier Act, a Royal Commission as late as 1833 found chil- 
dren working fifteen hours a day. 

1 The word child is not used in the Act of 1802; it does appear 
in the Act of 1833. 



366 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

James Grahame's The Birds of Scotland contains affect- 
ing lines on the abuse of children in industry. Like the 
benevolists, he pities the caged bird, and in a sympathetic 
mood recalls that the bird's fate is no more pitiable than 
that of children confined in factories. If Grahame does not 
express himself with the power of Wordsworth, his lines 
nevertheless give a vivid picture of what one of Words- 
worth's contemporaries saw in cities. 

Nor is thy lot more hard than that which they 
(Poor linnets!) prove in many a storied pile. ^ 
They see the light, 'tis true they see, and know 
That light for them is but an implement 
Of toil. In summer with the sun they rise 
To toil: nor does the shortened winter day 
Their toil abridge : for, ere the cock's first crow, 
Aroused to toil, they lift their heavy eyes, 
And force their childish limbs to rise and toil. 

Grahame had also a vision of traditional home industry, 
which had not robbed the child of freedom. 

And while the winter night, by cottage fire, 
Is spent in homebred industry, relieved 
By harmless glee, or tale of witch, or ghost, 
So dreadful that the housewife's listening wheel 
Suspends its hum, their toil protracted lasts. 

No joys, no sports have they: what little time. 
The fragment of an hour, can be retrenched 
From labour, is devoted to a shew, 
A boasted boon, of what the public gives — 
Instruction. Viewing all around the bliss 
Of liberty, they feel its loss the more. 

Children bound to industrial slavery see birds flitting past 
the factory windows, 

But no sweet note by them is heard, all lost, 
Extinguished in the noise that ceaseless stuns the ear. 

^ Cotton factories. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 367 

As with Crabbe, ''stern Truth" led Grahame to a reali- 
zation of the deg^radation of man through heartless exploi- 
tation of the child. Enamoured of the beauty of nature and 
the joy it gives man, he saw nothing but vice festering in 
smoky cities. 

If such be the effects of that sad system, 

Which, in the face of nature's law, would wring 

Gain from the labouring hands of playful children; 

If such the effects, where worth and sense direct 

The living, intellectual machines. 

What must not follow, when the power is lodged 

With senseless, sordid, heartless avarice? 

Wordsworth held that wherever the boy may turn, he 
is still a prisoner in the industrial system, and can not 
breathe God's free air that ought to be fanning his temples 
in woods and by the side of streams. 

His raiment, whitened o'er with cotton flakes 
Or locks of wool, announces whence he comes. 
Creeping his gait and cowering, his lip pale, 
His respiration quick and audible. (VIII. 309-312) 

State and church have neglected their duties toward the 
industrial child as toward the ploughboy of remote districts. 
The poet can scarcely fancy that a gleam could break 
from the languid eyes of the factory boy, or a blush mantle 
on his cheek. This is not the human being who in child- 
hood should enjoy liberty of mind and body, and the thrill 
of vivid physical sensation along the blood, to make him 
''Sublime from present purity and joy." {Excursion VIII, 
320.) What can the state hope from manhood reared on 
such foundations? The Recluse exclaims that there is no 
hope for such children or for tens of thousands who are suf- 
fering a wrong as deep. From such as these, when they 
have been discarded by the factories, are recruited the abject 



368 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

human shapes who in rag^s issue from tottering hovels or 
meet the traveler on the skirts of furze-clad commons to 
whine and stretch out their hands for coins (VIII, 364). 

No one in England takes delight in this industrial op- 
pression ; the (bondage goes by no high-sounding name. Yet 
women who have children of their own, behold this without 
compassion, yea, even with praise. The little group in the 
parsonage who have been discussing this grave problem, 
turn their thoughts to the happier theme of the "blooming 
boys" who come from a fishing expedition after having 
spent a few short hours as "thriving prisoners of the 
village-school." (IX, 260.) Their lot is a happy one. 
When they are grown men they will look back on child- 
hood, and say that justice was shown them "alike to body 
and to mind." Then Wordsworth states his conception of 
popular education. 

O for the coming of that glorious time 

When, prizing knowledge as her noblest wealth 

And best protection, this imperial Realm, 

Wihile she exacts allegiance, shall admit 

An obligation, on her part, to teach 

Them who are born to serve her and obey; 

Binding herself by statute to secure 

For all the children whom her soil maintains 

The rudiments of letters, and inform 

The mind with moral and religious truth, 

Both understood and practised, — so that none, 

However destitute, be left to droop 

By timely culture unsustained. (IX, 293-305) 

The lisping babe proclaims this inherent right to the pro- 
tection of its innocence ; and the rude boy, "having overpast 
the sinless age," who is on mischief bent and turns the "god- 
like faculty of speech To impious use," thereby makes 
known the need of education. It is fruitlessly announced; 
but it mounts like a prayer "to reach the State's parental 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 369 

ear." England will listen to the prayer if she is not un- 
feelingly devoid of a mother's heart. 

Wordsworth then phrases a message to be heeded in 
our days as well as in the days after the Revolution and 
during the ferment before the Reform Bill. As he looks 
abroad on the continent of Europe, he sees long-reverenced 
laws and customs a'bolished, and territory spHt like Polar 
fields of ice rent by the wind. Discontent takes obnoxious 
shapes, that may overthrow law and order even in ''these 
fair Isles." With keen insight he observes that the forces 
which blindly aim to subvert institutions would be thwarted 
if ignorance that breeds dark discontent, and runs into wild 
disorder, were removed by education. Education is no 
more than a prudent caution which requires that the whole 
people should be taught and trained so that "black resolve" 
may be rooted out, and virtuous habits take its place. He 
has faith that the voice of English lawgivers, sounding 
"From out the bosom of these troubled times," will work 
this general good and that England will "complete her 
glorious destiny." In those days she will behold in her- 
self "change wide, and deep, and silently performed," arising 

from the pains 
And faithful care of unambitious schools 
Instructing simple childhood's ready ear. 

(IX, 394-396) 

Since the moral crisis which had swept away his hopes 
for a regeneration of society through legislation, he had 
worked gradually toward the conception which sees in the 
education of the child the hope of the future. In the high 
vision of a society humanised the world over through edu- 
cation of the individual, he scornfully brushes aside as 
groundless the gloomy speculations of the Malthusians, who 
fear overpopulation. 



370 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

With such foundations laid, avaunt the fear 
Of numbers crowded on their native soil, 
To the prevention of all healthful growth 
Through mutual injury! Rather in the law 
Of increase and the mandate from above 
Rejoice! (IX, 363-368) 

At the same time, although he does not like Berkeley turn 
his back on the old world, Wordsworth finds that the new 
world is necessary for a realization of his ideal. As bees 
divide in swarming time and find a new abode, so English- 
men will find new homes beyond the seas. 

So the wide waters, open to the power, 

The will, the instincts, and appointed needs 

Of Britain, do invite her to cast off 

Her swarms, and in succession send them forth; 

Bound to establish new communities 

On every shore whose aspect favours hope 

Of bold adventure ; promising to skill 

And perseverance their deserved reward. 
* 

Earth's universal frame shall feel the effect; 

Even till the smallest habitable rock. 

Beaten by lonely billows, hear the songs 

Of humanised society; and bloom 

With civil arts, that shall breathe forth their fragrance, 

A grateful tribute to all-ruling Heaven. (IX, 375-391) 

On the highways of England, Wordsworth had often 
observed the direct evil effects of child labor. It is an 
historical fact that children, because of their size, were 
peculiarly adapted for work at certain types of machines, 
so that the tradition of child labor very early became es- 
tablished. Ruthless parish officers, against whom Lang- 
horne and Cowper inveighed, paid manufacturers five 
pounds a head for children taken off their hands, to be 
worked from the age of five, as in the Stockport hat trade, 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 371 

fourteen hours in the twenty-four. After these poor children 
had literally outgrown their usefulness, they were heartless- 
ly turned loose upon the community without having learned 
a useful occupation. Wordsworth had observed the effects 
of this method, and his plan for universal education was de- 
signed to eliminate the helplessness of such children, who 
without education inevitably became beggars or criminals. 

like the vagrants of the gipsy tribe, 
These, bred to little pleasure in themselves, 
Are profitless to others. (VIII, 389-391) 

Three poems composed in 1802 reflect his humanitarian 
interest in children on the highways. Beggars and its se- 
quel are delightful literary studies of vagrants; the poems 
represent careful observation of the rapidly changing moods 
of children. The vitality and care-free nature of these 
"joyous vagrants" who in the "twinkling of an eye" could 
change their interest from butterflies to begging, fascinated 
him. Nevertheless they stirred in him subtle misgivings 
for their future. They met him in a genial hour when all 
nature breathed happiness. Therefore his pessimism is 
tempered with a sunny optimism that struggles to give him 
hope. 

Kind Spirits ! may we not believe 

That they, so happy and so fair 

Through your sweet influence, and the care 

Of pitying Heaven, at least were free 

From touch of deadly injury? 

Destined, whate'er their earthly doom, 

For mercy and immortal bloom? 

In Sabbath Walk, Grahame is likewise hopeful, and 
breathes prayers of thanks because toilers in factories may 
on the Lord's day walk by thousands in fields and meadows. 
It soothes his heart to see children of toilworn city dwellers 



372 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

pull promiscuously weeds and flowers which "proudly" in 
their parent's breast ''they smiling fix." This is a new sit- 
uation in English poetry. It is pleasant to come upon chil- 
dren of the industrial class at play in the open fields, and 
enjoying what poets earher in the century had observed only 
among cottage children in idyllic surroundings. Grahame's 
lines ring true and show direct observation especially in 
the failure of city-bred children to discriminate between 
weed and flower. 

A study of Wordsworth's literary treatment of the hu- 
manitarian aspects of childhood may well close with a notice 
of Alice Fell; or Poverty (1802), which is important also 
as an illustration of literary tendencies. In earlier poetry, 
especially in that of Swift, Shenstone, and Cowper, children 
are found jeering in chorus at travellers on the highway. 
A sound with a different import followed the chaise oc- 
cupied by Mr. Grahame of Glasgow, brother of the poet 
James Grahame. The incident made such a deep impres- 
sion on this "man of ardent humanity," who was a helper 
of Clarkson, that he requested Wordsworth to put it into 
verse "for humanity's sake." 

Wordsworth need not have been ashamed of the simple 
ballad of a child's mishap on the king's highway. It would 
have been better for his standing as a poet had he omitted 
Peter Bell, the abuser of animals, from the editions of 1820 
to 1832. The simple story of Alice Fell, the orphan girl, 
whose cloak had been caught in the wheel of Mr. Grahame's 
chaise, on the back of which she had climbed, must have 
made an appeal even in the days when small critics were 
ridiculing the simplicity of Wordsworth's verse. His sym- 
pathy is clearly with the sobbing child who could only choke 
out the words "my cloak." He emphasizes the humanitarian 
traits of the charitable passengers : they left sufficient money 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 373 

with the innkeeper to buy a cloak of "duffil gray." Words- 
worth was attracted to the child who could not be consoled 
for the loss of her coat ; weatherbeaten as it was, it had 
fended her against cold and rain. A child under such cir- 
cumstances is capaWe of but one thought; and true to 
child nature, Wordsworth represents her as unconsolable 
throughout the journey to Durham. 

Alice Fell represents the extreme rebound from the gen- 
eralized attitude towardsWMTdren. It is a detached poem 
on childhood, and it illustrates the fusion of concrete in- 
dividuahzing details with the humanitarian element. His 
insistence on accuracy of detail led him not only to give the 
child's name, but also to identify the city toward which she 
was riding. He wrote of her with a fine feeling that infuses 
his lines with the warmth and glow of humanity. The in- 
sistence on details is reflected in Lamb's letter written at the 
time when Wordsworth was thinking of revising the poem, 
possibly with an eye to pleasing his critics : "I am glad that 
you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels. I would 
not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon 
the stript shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all 
their malice; I would not have given 'em a red cloak to 
save their souls." 

Gay wrote with artistic detachment about slum children ; 
Blake had the little chimney sweep voice a bitter protest 
against social conditions that oppressed city children ; Crabbe 
laid bare with photographic realism the environment of 
children in filthy hovels. Wordsworth combined all these 
elements. He depicted the suffering and degradation of 
children in industry; he protested against the philosophy 
which sought to justify child labor; in concrete details he 
truthfully and convincingly set forth the conditions against 
which he protested. But Wordsworth added an element 



374 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

not found in Gay, Blake, or Crabbe. He incorporated a 
definite program of reform that is more liberal than that 
of the House of Indus4;ry. With deep insight into the 
powers of nature and the faculties of man, he offered 
practical suggestions for a measurable realization of his 
dreams of a happy state of childhood. His faith in the 
sanctity of childhood, and his unshakable belief in the 
natural rig-ht of every child to enjoy the birthright of free- 
dom, led him to a solution that is still being tested in the 
common schools of England and America. 

IV 

Wordsworth's most exalted conception of childhood is 
found in the Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollec- 
tions of Early Childhood (1803-1806). The Ode is the 
glory of his poetry. It is also the crown of one hundred 
years of poetic treatment of childhood. He wrote of his con 
templated master poem, which was never completed, and of 
which The Prelude and The Excursion form only a part, in 
terms of a cathedral, in relation to which his shorter poems 
stand as chantries and chapels. In this conception the in- 
comparable Ode is worthy of the position of the Lady 
Chapel. Professor Knight, who took the poem out of its 
chronological position and placed it at the close of Words- 
worth's collected works, considered it ''the greatest of 
Wordsworth's poems, and that to which all others lead up." 

The Ode is the summation not only of Wordsworth's 
philosophy (which found its base in childhood), but also of 
the attitude toward childhood reflected in those poets of the 
eighteenth century who have been noticed in this study. It 
is a final complete expression of the essence of those phases 
which are vital to the naturalistic interpretation. It is the 
natural and inevitable outgrowth of tendencies that had 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 375 

become focused in Wordsworth during the years in which 
the Ode was composed. It reveals the profoundest and 
richest expression of Wordsworth's faith in the unsulHed 
purity of the child's intuitions. 

The first four stanzas were composed in 1803, and the 
remainder of the poem perhaps just before or immediately 
after the completion of The Prelude. Wordsworth wrote, 
"Two years at least passed between the writing of the first 
four stanzas and the remaining part." It was completed in 
1806 and published in 1807. The Ode was conceived, then, 
in those years when his mind was occupied with recollec- 
tion of his childhood during the composition of his auto- 
biographical poem. 

There were certain events of a domestic nature which al- 
so centered his attention on childhood and immortality at this 
time. During the month of August, 1802, William and 
Dorothy visited Calais, where he walked on Calais sands 
with his daughter, who is the child of the sonnet, "It is a 
beauteous evening, calm and free." The concluding lines 
state his faith in the divine element in children : 

Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here, 
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, 
Thy nature is not therefore less divine : 
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year ; 
And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine, 
God being with thee when we know it not. 

In October, 1802, Mary Hutchinson, with whom he had 
attended Anne Birkett's infant school at Penrith in 1777, 
became his wife. In 1803, the year in which the Ode was 
begun, his son John was born ; and in 1804 his daughter 
Dora. In February, 1805, his favorite brother John lost 
his life in the wreck of his ship. The poet's thoughts had 
since 1798 been occupied with childhood in relation to the 
soul life of man, and the death of his brother, whose loss 



376 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

moved him deeply, centered his thoughts on the problem of 
immortality. The first four stanzas (1803) of the Ode are 
in the mood of The Prelude. -When he took up the Ode 
again in 1805, he began with the well-known fifth stanza 
which adds the element not to be found in eighteenth-cen- 
tury poetry on the recollection of early childhood. He 
explains the divinity of childhood by proclaiming the con- 
tinuity of existence.^ Wordsworth more than half be- 
lieved in this in spite of his palliative remarks addressed to 
orthodox readers in the Fenwick note: ''But let us bear in 
mind that, though the idea is not advanced in revelation, 
there is nothing there to contradict it, and the fall of man 
presents an analogy in its favour. Accordingly, a pre- 
existent state has entered into the popular creeds of many 
nations." 

In view of his high conception of the natural rights of 
children and the glory of childhood, it is not surprising that 
Wordsworth should have looked upon the child as an oracle 
of God newly come from his maker. It was in fact in- 
evitable that he should do this, for to postulate a previous 
state of existence is but to carry one step farther the affec- 
tionate recollection of childhood in native fields. In The 
Prelude and The Excursion he holds in the main to the child 
living among men, and makes a plea for the natural rights 
of the child. In the Ode he gives an interpretation of those 
powers upon which the naturalistic conception may be based. 
He answers the question, *'Why is the child capable of 
greater joy than man, and why should man reverence child- 

1 Although Beattie has written beautiful lines on the innocence 
and purity of children, he seems to have had no idea of a pre- 
existent state. In the Ode to Hope he writes : 
When first on Childhood's eager gaze 
Life's varied landscape, stretched immense around, 
Starts out of night profound. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 377 

hood ?" In the course of his solution of this mystery, Words- 
worth has touched upon every motive of the theme of child- 
hood noticed during the previous century. His solution may 
have been suggested by Platonic philosophy or by Vaughan.^ 
Whatever the source of his inspiration, it was inevitable in 
the development of the naturalistic conception of innate 
goodness, that a poet should face the problem of finding the 
reason for the greater purity and happiness of children. 

The earliest poetry in the tradition that leads to the Ode, 
reveals how the poet turned instinctively to cottage children. 
Thomas Warton had pictured in The Hamlet a sunny land- 
scape peopled by care-free cottage children. Akenside and 
Bruce affectionately recalled their own childhood in the 
presence of nature ; and in the revised version of his poem, 
Akenside is definitely suggestive of the cadence and rhythm 

1 Plato's Phaedo and Phaedrus, Henry Vaughan's The Re- 
treate, Corruption, and The World, and Thomas Traherne's Wonder, 
offer parallels to Wordsworth's Ode in so far as they also adopt 
the doctrine of pre-existence. There are, however, in each instance, 
differences in application. An eighteenth -century anonymous poem 
Pre-Existence A Poem in Imitation of Milton refers to the Platonic 
conception of ideas. With Spenser's description of the "Garden of 
Adonis" in the Faerie Queene Wordsworth must have been familiar, 
as he and Dorothy were persistent readers of Spenser. Professor 
E. Hershey Sneath states that the reference to Plato in the Fenwick 
note "hardly warrants us in saying that he borrowed his doctrine 
from Plato. The roots of the Poet's conviction seem to have been 
imbedded in the subsoil of his trance-experiences of childhood, 
which gave him the consciousness of a world above, and more real 
than the natural world of sense ... in trying to interpret this 
experience to himself, and then to others, so far as it related to 
pre-existence, he found his conviction sanctioned by Plato. But 
the conviction itself appears ultimately to have had its origin in 
these unique experiences of childhood and youth." — Wordsworth, 
Poet of Nature and Poet of Man, by E. Hershey Sneath, Ginn and 
Company, 1912, p. 217. 



378 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

of Wordsworth's most exalted recollections of a childhood 
influenced by mountains, forests, and streams. Beattie's 
Minstrel in the same decade depicts an individual child who 
responds sensitively to subtle influences emanating from 
external nature. In fact, Dorothy recognized points of 
likeness between Beattie's ideal "natural" boy and her 
brother William. Whether in the person of a Lavina or 
Edwin, or in the childhood of Bruce or Akenside, the child 
is at the center of naturalistic poetry. Naturalistic poetry 
reversed the methods of poets like Prior, who in their pre- 
occupation with the institutional child looked forward im- 
patiently to manhood or womanhood. The romantic poets, 
in place of looking to man for a realization of their hopes, 
asked man to look back to childhood as the ideal state: to 
realize his highest hopes, man must become again a child. 
The element which stimulated poets to a new interest in 
children, and which added novelty to the mystical exaltation 
of the child by Christ, they found in Shaftesbury's philo- 
sophy that identified the good and the beautiful. 

They did not feel it necessary to go to the noble savage to 
find natural instincts expressed with primitive clearness ; 
here was the child fresh from the hands of nature, and 
living instinctively in harmony with the laws of nature. 
Bruce, Akenside, and Lovibond not only lovingly recalled 
childhood as the beautiful season of life, when God was im- 
manent and the sole guiding force, but Lovibond exalted the 
child by holding him up as a model for men in their relation 
to created beings in the realm of external nature. In their 
childhood, and then only, these poets had been in full har- 
mony with the spirit of love, which permeates the universe, 
and for a recognition of which Langhorne pleaded in The 
Country- Justice. The days of childhood not only were 
those of true happiness, but it was then that ''Life's morning 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 379 

radiance had not left the hills" ; it was in those early years 
of simple childhood that ''Nature and those rustic powers" 
revealed a "light" that is seldom beheld by the grown man. 
Like Blake, the poets of this school scorned unaided 
reason, not like Keats on purely esthetic grounds, but be- 
cause reason alone will not help man to penetrate the mys- 
teries of life. These are revealed, in their estimation, most 
fully in the primitive intuitions of the child, because he is 
closest to his maker. Wordsworth expresses this in his 
sonnet to Mrs. Southey (Miscellaneous Sonnets, XXXVI, 

1837) : 

delegated Spirits comfort fetch 
To Her from heights that Reason may not win. 
Like Children, She is privileged to hold 
Divine Communion; both do live and move. 
Whate'er to Shallow Faith their ways unfold, 
Inly illumined by Heaven's pitying love. 

But this spirit of love, manifest in the child, is soon lost 
in the man : 

Love pitying innocence, not long to last, 
In them. 

Wordsworth is not toying in the Ode. He crystallizes 
the conception of the poets before his time by speaking of 
childhood in terms of faith and religion. In this way he 
interprets the reverence for childhood implied in the natural- 
istic attitude. The earlier poets emphasize the cares and 
glooms of age. Wordsworth, however, is interested in what 
survives in man from his childhood. In one of his latest 
highly inspired poems, the evening voluntary Composed 
Upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty 
(1818), he is stirred with the fervor characteristic of his 
earlier effusions. Once again he writes of common ob- 
jects in a strain of exalted emotion that recalls the mood of 
Tintern Abbey and the Ode itself. 



380 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Such hues from their celestial Urn 

Were wont to stream before mine eye, 

Where'er it wandered in the morn 

Of blissful infancy. 

This glimpse of glory, why renewed? 

Nay, rather speak with gratitude ; 

For, if a vestige of those gleams 

Survived, 'twas only in my dreams. 

Dread Power ! whom peace and calmness serve 

No less than Nature's threatening voice, 

If aught unworthy be my choice. 

From THEE if I would swerve; 

Oh, let Thy grace remind me of the light 

Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored; 

Which, at this moment, on my waking sight 

Appears to shine, by miracle restored; 

My soul, though yet confined to earth, 

Rejoices in a second birth! 

He is here thinking of those "first-born affections" that are 
clearly evident in the ''gleams" vouchsafed to the child but 
lost to the man. In Maternal Grief (1810) he writes: 

The Child she mourned had overstepped the pale 

Of Infancy, but still did breathe the air 

That sanctifies its confines, and partook 

Reflected beams of that celestial light 

To all the Little-ones on sinful earth 

Not unvouchsafed — a light that warmed and cheered 

Those several qualities of heart and mind 

Which, in her own blest nature, rooted deep, 

Daily before the Mother's watchful eye. 

And not hers only, their peculiar charms 

Unfolded. 

Wordsworth's high seriousness has transmuted the 
cruder ore of the eigfhteenth century. While writing of 
the soul in Night Thoughts (Book VI), Young, whose ar- 
gument leads him to despise life, could only see in the "tow- 
ering talents, and terrestrial aims" of a genius, 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 381 

as thrown from her high sphere, 
The glorious fragments of a soul immortal, 
With rubbish mixt, and glittering in the dust. 

Mackenzie exalted childhood in Pursuits of Happiness: 
See fresh from nature's hand, unfettered youth. 

But he was able to express his sense of loss only in the con- 
ventional manner : 

But soon, too soon, the airy fabrics fall, 
And servile Reason lacqueys Interest's call: 
Now Caution creeps where Virtue stalked before, 
And cons the battered page of Prudence o'er. 

The following lines from Beattie's Ode to Hope are 
typical of the best expression given before Wordsworth to 
the sense of something lost : 

Ye days, that balmy influence shed, 

When sweet childhood, ever sprightly, 

In paths of pleasure sported lightly, 

Whither, ah, whither, are ye fled? 

Ye cherub train, that brought him on his way, 

O, leave him not midst tumult and dismay. 

In his indomitable optimism, Thomson, although ex- 
ternal, is close to Wordsworth. Thomson realizes a dififer- 
ence between age and youth, but is not moved to melancholy 
musings : 

Bid the morn of youth 

Rise to new light, and beam afresh the days 

Of innocence, simplicity, and truth; 

To cares estranged, and manhood's thorny ways : 

What transport, to retrace our boyish plays. 

Our easy bliss, when each thing joy supplied; 

The woods, the mountains, and the warbling maze 

Of the wild brooks! (Castle of Indolence, Canto I) 

Gray's recollection of his ^boyhood days at Eton is at 
times premonitory of the Ode in mood and phrasing, al- 



382 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

though Gray like other eighteenth-century poets is not con- 
cerned in the same sense as Wordsworth with the spiritual 
relationship between child and nature. 

Ah happy hills, ah pleasing shade, 

Ah fields beloved in vain, 
Where once my careless childhood strayed, 

A stranger yet to pain! 
I feel the gales, that from ye blow, 
A momentary bliss bestow, 

As waving fresh their gladsome wing 
My weary soul they seem to soothe, 
And redolent of joy and youth, 

To breathe a second spring. 

If certain similarities are evident, the differences are 
also obvious. The earlier poets felt the emotion which 
prompted Wordsworth, but they are less sure and power- 
ful in expression because they hold to physical aspects. 
The mood, moreover, has not been correlated with all the 
experiences of the poet's life. Wordsworth's highly de- 
veloped local feeling, which was physical at bottom to be 
sure, and which attached itself to objects familiar from in- 
fancy, served, nevertheless, frequently to stir recollections 
of a subtler nature. As a result, the backward look is the 
mainspring of his poetic activities; recollection lies at the 
root of his being. When expounding his philosophy of 
the simple life, he is sooner or later sure to anchor his most 
inspired thoughts in childhood, and especially in the spiritual 
gleam that came to the child in the moments of his most 
intense delight in nature. 

He was fully conscious of the important place he had 
assigned to the child as the chief factor in his carefully 
wrought philosophy. In the twelfth book of The Prelude 
he exclaims : 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 383 

Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth 
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see 
In simple childhood something of the base 
On which thy greatness stands. 
* 

The days gone by 
Return upon me almost from the dawn 
Of life: The hiding-places of man's power 
Open. (XII, 272-280) 

The earlier poets have not expressed themselves with the 
same fullness, because, being precursors of Blake and 
Wordsworth, they did not realize all the implications of 
their attitude toward childhood. Wordsworth, on the other 
hand, had deliberately and by gradual stages evolved a phi- 
losophy in which childhood is the fundamental consideration. 
His lines reveal the power which comes with a full reali- 
zation that the child is at the center of his philosophy. ^ In 
The Prelude he has written of childhood in terms of sanc- 
tification : 

Our childhood sits, 

Our simple childhood, sits upon a throne 

That hath more power than all the elements. 

I guess not what this tells of Being past, 

Nor what it augurs of the life to come; 

But so it is. (V, 507-512) 

He employs the language of religion to reflect the sacred- 

ness of childhood. 

Ah ! why in age 
Do we revert so fondly to the walks 
Of childhood — ^but that there the Soul discerns 
The dear memorial footsteps unimpaired 

^Wordsworth, according to the Wordsworth Coivcordance, 
has used the following words in their different forms : child, over 
four hundred times; hahe and hahy, over one hundred times; infant, 
over one hundred and twenty-five times; girl, fifty times; and hoy, 
over two hundred and fifty times. 



384 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Of her own native vigour; thence can hear 
Reverberations; and a choral song, 
Commingling with the incense that ascends, 
Undaunted, toward the imperishable heavens, 
From her own lonely altar? (Excursion, IX, 36-44) 

Although specific indebtedness is not meant to be sug- 
gested, the extent to which Wordsworth is the recipient of 
influences at work for a century is evident in the way the 
Ode brings together and fuses into one majestic conception 
of childhood the vocabulary and imagery which may be 
found scattered throughout eighteenth-century poetry deal- 
ing with childhood. Where parallels exist he has converted 
the earlier imagery into something rich and strange. Where 
poets had often inclined to matter-of-fact statement, 
Wordsworth's lines reveal power and 'beauty that come only 
with imaginative realization. (The transmutation is like 
that in the closing lines of the beautiful tribute To a Young 
Lady. In prose and poetry of the eighteenith century there 
are innumerable references to Lapland, which seems to 
have had a fascination for the age ; but the references with 
which Wordsworth must have been familiar from his read- 
ing are colorless and uninspired. With a master poet's 
sure sense of values he penetrates to the innermost beauty of 
the reference and emotionally fuses it with his promises for 
the old age of a mother of children : 

an old age serene and bright, 
And lovely as a Lapland night. 
Shall lead thee to thy grave. 

Although the poem Pre-Existence (A Poem in Imitation 
of Milton) does not touch upon childhood, it is important 
as constituting a possible link between Wordsworth's in- 
terest in childhood and his doctrine of a pre-existent state. 
Wordsworth was well read in the poetry of the eighteenth 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 385 

century, and it is not at all improbable that he was ac- 
quainted with this poem. ^ 

Pre-Existence recognizes a previous life of the soul. 
The anonymous poet changed the Miltonic conception so 
that the fallen angels are permanently enclosed in Hell. 
God passed judgment also on angels who, though they had 
joined in sedition, had since sued for "clemency and grace." 
These angels were condemned to live as human beings on 
the earth, where they are not, however, allowed to possess 
the faculties of their divine state. Beneath chaos sits Silence, 
from an urn in whose hands flows Lethe. 

Hither compelled, each soul must drink long draughts 

Of those forgetful streams, till forms within, 

And all the great ideas fade and die : 

For if vast thought should play about a mind 

Inclosed in flesh, and dragging cumbrous life, 

Fluttering and beating in the mournful cage, 

It soon would break its gates and wing away: 

'Tis therefore my decree, the soul return 

Naked from off this beach, and perfect blank, ~ 

To visit the new world; and straight to feel 

Itself, in crude consistence closely shut, 

The dreadful monument of just revenge; 

Immured by heaven's own hand, and placed erect 

On fleeting matter, all imprisoned round 

With walls of clay: th' aetherial mould shall bear 

The chain of members, deafened with an ear, 

Blinded by eyes, and manacled in hands. 

Here anger, vast ambition, and disdain, 

And all the haughty movements, rise and fall, 

As storms of neighboring atoms tear the soul; 

^ Wordsworth owned a set of Bell's volumes of collected 
poetry. 

2 Wordsworth protests against this view in the Ode. 



386 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

And hope, and love, and all the calmer turns 
Of easy hours, in their gay gilded shapes, 
With sudden run, skim o'er deluded minds, 
As matter leads the dance. . . . 

As men they will vainly strive to appease their longings, be- 
cause their souls will not be free 

till all in death 
Shall vanish, and the prisoner, now enlarged, 
Regains the flaming borders of the sky. 

It seems, however, that the poet has allowed an obscure 
sense of a higher life to Hnger, but only as a torment to 
the clay-enclosed soul. 

JUDGMENT, blinded by delusive SENSE, 

Contracted through the cranny of an eye. 

Shoots up faint languid beams, to that dark seat. 

Wherein the soul, bereaved of native fire. 

Sits intricate, in misty clouds obscured. 

Even from itself concealed, and there presides 

O'er jarring images with Reason's sway, 

Which by his ordering more confounds their form . . . 

The more he strives t' appease, the more he feels 

The struggling surges of the darksome void 

Impetuous, and the thick revolving thoughts 

Encountering thoughts, image on image turned, 

A Chaos of wild silence, where sometimes 

The clashing notions strike out casual light. 

Which soon must perish and be lost again 

In the thick darkness round it. Now, he tries 

With all his might to raise some weighty thought. 

Of me, of fate, or of th' eternal round. 

Which but recoils to crush the labouring mind. 

High are his reasonings, but the feeble clue 

Of fleeting images he draws in vain. . . . 

Poems on outdoor play and native fields are in the direct 
line of development that leads to the Ode. But suggestions 
for the thought of the first four stanzas of the Ode, and for 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 387 

the phraseology of all of it, are also to be found in poems on 
the subject of immortality. Wordsworth must have been 
familiar with Prior's Solomon, in the third book of which 
Prior brings together thoughts of childhood and immortal- 
ity; with Young's Night Thoughts; with Isaac Hawkins 
Browne's De Animi Immortalitate (1759), translated by 
numerous versifiers, and especially by Soame Jenyns ; and 
with Thomas Denton's Immortality. Similarity is often 
striking in lines on outdoor play and native fields. The 
difference, however, between poetry and versifying is more 
obvious in those poems that develop the theme of immor- 
taHty. Denton, for instance, speaks of the rainbow as 
"moon-sprung Iris" and "roscid bow," and of the soul as 
"The ray divine, the pure ethereal mate," and in phrasing the 
specifically childhood element can not get beyond "prattling 
childhood lisps with mimick air." 

Yet certain lines in Denton's poem contain hints and 
sometimes definite suggestions that provide parallels for 
certain details in Wordsworth's development in the Ode. 
Denton seems to have had an inkling that the vital spirit, 
unlike the body which is subject to decay, is not limited to a 
terrestrial and a future life. In making out a case for im- 
mortality after death, he looks back to man's hour of birth, 
at which time the vital spirit is not so much born as re- 
awakened. He does not definitely postulate a pre-existent 
state; but he does seem to suggest that birth is not alto- 
gether the beginning of the vital principle which animates 
the human clay. 

As when Lucina ends the pangful strife, 

Lifts the young babe, and lights her lambent flame, 

Some powers new-waking hail the dawning life, 
Some unsuspended live, unchanged, the same; 

So from our dust fresh faculties may bloom, 

Some posthumous survive, and triumph o'er the tomb. 



388 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Wordsworth makes this precise and definite, clothes it in 
appropriate imagery in the lines beginning **The Soul that 
rises with us," and changes the emphasis by focusing the 
whole argument not on death but on birth. 

Like Wordsworth, Denton immediately proceeds with 
his argument by discussing the influence of the body on the 
re-awakened soul. 

This fibrous frame by nature's kindly law, 

Which gives each joy to keen sensation here, 
O'er purer scenes of bliss the veil may draw, 

And cloud reflection's more exalted sphere. 
When Death's cold hand with all dissolving power 

Shall the close tie with friendly stroke unbind, 
AHke our mortal as our natal hour 

May to new being raise the waking mind : 
On death's new genial day the soul may rise. 
Born to some higher life, and hail some brighter skies. 

Wordsworth enriches this and makes it specific in 

Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
Upon the growing Boy. 

He focuses his thought on the child, whereas Denton al- 
ways approaches with reverse emphasis, his purpose being 
to prove immortality after death, at which time the soul 
will again be re-awakened. 

In lines that precede those on birth, Denton also refers 
to the stages of the child's development. In Denton's lines 
Wordsworth might well have found certain headings for his 
development in the Ode. 

See man, by varied periods fixt by fate. 

Ascend perfection's scale by slow degree: 
The plant-like foetus quits its senseless state. 

And helpless hangs sweet-smiling on the knee ; 
Soon outward objects steal into the brain, 

Next prattHng childhood lisps with mimic air, 
Then mem'ry links her fleet ideal train, 

And sober reason rises to compare, 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 389 

The full-grown breast some manly passion warms, 
It pants for glory's meed, or beats to love's alarms. 
Then say, since nature's high behest appears 

That living forms should change of being prove, 
In which new joy the novel scene endears, 

New objects rise to please, new wings to move; 
Since man too, taught by sage experience, knows 

His frame revolving treads life's varying stage, 
That the man-plant first vegetating grows. 

Then sense directs, then reason rules in age. . . . 

Denton's poem, then, differs from the Ode in that it 
emphasizes immortaHty after death; in that the passages 
which are suggestive of Wordsworth's argument do not 
appear in the same sequence as in the Ode; and in that his 
phrasing is conventional. Yet Wordsworth, brooding over 
the loss of the freshness of the "gleam," and striving to find 
a philosophical basis for his exaltation of childhood, could 
have found in Pre-Existence and in Denton's Immortality 
suggestions for his backward look beyond the birth of the 
child. 1 

The differences between Wordsworth's emotional lines 
and the colder reasonings of the earher poets are evident 
from a comparison with the third book of Prior's Solomon, 
which in certain respects offers parallels conceived in the 
mood of the early eighteenth century. 

Prior is disturbed by the problem of earthly existence 
in relation to immortality. His colorless lines read like 
versified philosophy. 

1 In Night Thoughts Young writes: 
God's image disinherited of day, 
Here, plunged in mines, forgets a sun was made. 
And again: 

Death but entombs the body, life the soul. 
Young is concerned with Death, his thesis being that death is the 
great liberator. 



390 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Come, then, my soul; I call thee by that name, 
Thou busy thing, from whence I know I am. 
* 

But how cam'st thou to be, or whence thy spring? 
* 

Or, if thy great existence would inspire 
To causes more sublime, of heavenly fire 
Wert thou a spark struck off, a separate ray, 
Ordained to mingle with terrestrial clay. 

He finds upon reflection that he came forth ''naked" and 
must again lie "naked" in the tomb ; he uses the word again 
in ''helpless and naked, on a woman's knees." Prior is in 
a questioning mood. Wordsworth is not in doubt ; he has a 
positive vision, expressed in imagery born of deep emo- 
tional faith: 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 

Hath had elsewhere its setting. 
And Cometh from afar: 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God, who is our home. 

It was common enough before Wordsworth to write of 
human life as spent on an island or an isthmus. The idea 
that man looked across vast spaces, best expressed in terms 
of the illimitable ocean, was congenial to poets. Cowper 
wrote in Retirement: 

Opening the map of God's extensive plan, 
We find a little isle, this life of man. 

William Thompson had written in Sickness (Book IV, The 
Recovery), 

While on this isthmus of my fate I lie, 
Jutting into Eternity's wide sea. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 391 

In the Essay on Man, Pope wrote, 

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state. 

Prior gave the same thought a different emphasis: 

Amid two seas, on one small point of land, 

Weary'd, uncertain, and amazed, we stand : 

On either side our thoughts incessant turn ; 

Forward we dread, and looking back we mourn; 

Losing the present in this dubious haste. 

And lost ourselves betwixt the future and the past. 

Wordsworth's lines in The Preln.de more definitely shape 
the thought, and are suggestive of his attitude in the Ode. 

not less a tract 
Of the same isthmus, which our spirits cross 
In progress from their native continent 
To earth and human life. (V, 535-538) 

In the Ode, Wordsworth's sonorous Hues have clothed this 
thought with flesh and blood. Wordsworth has, moreover, 
definitely connected his lines with childhood. 

Hence in a season of calm weather 
Though inland far we be. 
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither. 
Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the Children sport upon the shore. 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 

There is also a vast difference between the nature pas- 
sages of Prior and Wordsworth. Prior is impersonal and 
cold: 

From his first fountain and beginning ouze, 
Down to the sea each brook and torrent flows. 

Wordsworth, a century later, gives expression to personal 
love and observation : 



392 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

I love the brooks which down their channels fret, 
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they. 

Even when Prior is personal, he is colorless : 

Each evening I behold the setting Sun, 
With downward speed into the Ocean run. 

Wordsworth's brooding spirit identifies itself with the 
powers of nature: 

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun 
Do take a sober colouring from an eye 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality. 

At the close of Solomon, Prior breaks into a song of 
praise, but his imagery is conventional : 

I said; — and instant bad the priests prepare 
The ritual sacrifice and solemn prayer. 
Select from vulgar herds, with garlands gay, 
A hundred bulls ascend the way. 
The artful youth proceed to form the choir; 
They breathe the flute, or strike the vocal wire. 
The maids in comely order next advance; 
They beat the timbrel, and instruct the dance. 

There is a vast difference between this early eighteenth- 
century statement and Wordsworth's naturalistic fervor a 
century later. Though there is a faint suggestion of the 
biblical language used by Prior, who was writing with the 
biblical account as his primary source, Wordsworth sings 
his song of praise in terms of the naturaHstic school : 

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song! 

And let the young Lambs bound 

As to the tabor's sound ! 
We in thought will join your throng, 

Ye that pipe and ye that play. 

Ye that through your hearts today 

Feel the gladness of the May! 
What though the radiance which was once so bright 
Be now forever taken from my sight. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 393 

Though nothing can bring back the hour 
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; 
We will grieve not, rather find 
Strength in what remains behind; 
In the primal sympathy 
Which having been must ever be. 

Unlike eighteenth-century poets like Gray, Beattie, Isaac 
Hawkins Browne, and others who wrote in imitation of 
Milton, and who could see no way out of the melancholy 
induced by contemplation of the difference between age and 
youth, Wordsworth catches at least temporarily the consol- 
ing gleam. He carries over the gloomier conception of the 
earfier poets only to protest against it and to triumph over it. 
In the eighteenth century there are numerous hymns 
and odes to health ; but all have to do with physical joy or 
its loss. Only occasionally is the matter connected defi- 
nitely with childhood. Wordsworth's power to take the 
cruder conceptions of minor versifiers and suffuse them 
with spiritual suggestions is obvious when his lines are read 
with those in Isaac Hawkins Browne's Ode to Health. 
Browne calls upon ''rosy Health" to return and be 

Indulgent now as once you smiled. 
In golden Youth's propitious May, 
When jocund danced my hours away. 
With love, and joy, and rapture blest. 
And thou wast there to crown the rest. 

His poem is a curious jumble of pagan and ascetic ideals. 
With one eye on Milton, and the other on nature, he is not 
successful in phrasing a clear-cut development of his theme. 
In the closing stanzas, however, while he is contemplating 
nature in spring, Browne pauses long enough to realize his 
sense of something lost between youth and old age: 



394 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

Through every form of mystic birth, 
The swarming air, the teeming earth, 
Through all the fruitful deep contains, 
Thy sovereign vital influence reigns, 
Mixes, ferments, inspires the whole, 
Pours the glad warmth, the genial soul, 
Breathes in the breeze, distils in showers. 
Swells the young bud, and wakes the flowers : 
With livelier green the herbage springs, 
The violet blows, the linnet sings. 
Its richest colouring Nature wears. 
And Pleasure leads the wanton years. 

This merely reminds him that he can not regain the health 

of his childhood : 

O ! see I pine distressed, forlorn. 
And seek in vain thy wished return. 

Certain lines in the Ode and in Langhorne's To the River 
Eden (1759) emphasize an essential difference in power of 
insig'ht and phrasing. Both poets were occupied with the 
recollection of childhood in the presence of natural objects, 
and both definitely reacted to their inability in later years to 
identify themselves with nature as fully as in the days of 
childhood. Langhorne is almost wholly external and de- 
scriptive, and hardly feels the later poet's identity of self 
with nature. (He came so close, however, to Wordsworth's 
mood that it is not surprising to find that Wordsworth 
thought very highly of Langhorne's poetry. Langhorne 
would have the ''maids of Memory" waken recollections of 
the days when Nature impressed "her image on my mind." 
There still come to him flashes of the old delight in nature. 
In the tree beside his favorite stream he once again finds a 
congenial stimulus: 

The poplar tall, that waving near 

Would whisper to thy murmurs free; 

Yet rustling seems to soothe mine ear, 
And trembles when I sigh for thee. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 395 

Like Wordsworth he realizes that he can not Hve over again 
the joys of childhood : 

In vain — the maids of Memory fair 
No more in golden visions play. 

His visions are of play hours, friendship, and love ("No 
Delia's smile approves my lay"). He is sorrowful not so 
much because he misses something in nature, as because he 
can not reproduce the joys of his childhood. Like Browne 
he is sighing for a return of palpable pleasures enjoyed in 
the presence of nature. 

Wordsworth, on the other hand, is momentarily moved 
to sorrow because his visions have to do with spiritual mat- 
ters. He is searching for the "gleam" in nature itself. 
He can no longer sustain the impression of a subtle power 
to which he responded spontaneously in childhood. His mis- 
givings are precipitated and crystallized when he looks upon 
familiar objects which no longer as in boyhood sustain the 
mood for which he longs. 

But there's a Tree, of many, one, 
A single Field which I have looked upon. 
Both of them speak of something that is gone : 

The Pansy at my feet 

Doth the same tale repeat: 
Whither is fled the visionary gleam? 
Where is it now, the glory and the dream? 

Although Wordsworth gave fullest expression to their 
conception, there is, then, an essential difference between 
him and those poets who had written feelingly of nature and 
childhood. This lies first in the power to convey his sense 
of the "gleam." And secondly, although moved to grief 
over loss, he does not feel that the loss is complete, so that 
he is thankful for what remains. He added, furthermore, 
the thought of continuous existence. After tracing the 



396 ENGLISH CHILDHOOD 

soul's coming in trailing clouds of glory, he exalts the 
child in a passage that carries to its inevitable conclusion 
the conception for which poets had been groping since 
Shaftesbury and Thomson. Many readers are doubtful 
whether the passage should, or even can, be literally inter- 
preted. Nevertheless, it truly represents the highest poetic 
flight in the spirit of those poets who down through the 
eighteenth century had looked upon the child with increas- 
ing aflfection, understanding, and reverence. 

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie 

Thy Soul's immensity; 
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep 
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind, 
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, 
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind, — 

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! 

On whom those truths do rest. 
Which we are toiling all our lives to find. 
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave; 
Thou, over whom thy Immortality 
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave, 
A Presence which is not to be put by; 
* 

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might 

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height, 

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke 

The years to bring the inevitable yoke, 

Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife? 

Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight, 

And custom lie upon thee with a weight. 

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life I 



INDEX 



Age, of children, poets on, 2 — 6, 

304. 
Akenside. Mark, 89, 94—95, 113, 

234, 299, Zn, 378. 
Animals, 7, 21. 24, Zd, 99ff., 262ff. 

Barbauld, A. L., 258—259, 287. 

Beattie, James, The Minstrel, 3, 
40, 70, 71, 75, 104—105, 158, 
237—238, Z1(i, 378, 381, 393; 
Lord Hay, 31—32, 327. 

Benevolence, universal, animals, 
96ff., (see also Blake, Shaftes- 
bury, and Wordsworth). 

Berkeley. Bishop, 217. 370. 

Blackstone, William, 78. 

Blair, Robert, 58—59. Ill, 331, 
ZZZ, ZZ6, 2>2,7, 338. 

Blake, William, 262—298, 1, 43, 
65, 66, 127, 149, 200, 219, 220, 
234. 259, 261. 314, 339, 340, 
349, 351, 353, 357, Z7Z, 379, 
383; children of the poor, 270, 
272, 274, 278, 282. 286, 287; 
Christian terminology, 293 ; 
ideal happiness, 65, 282—283, 
291, 296, 301; indebtedness to 
eighteenth century, 262ff., 268, 
276, 281, 283, 295, 299; natural 
desires, 273, 275, 284. 292, 293, 
294; not sectarian, 267; publi- 
cations for children, 264; re- 
verence for child nature, 277, 



278, 279. 285. 291; simple 
language, 266 ; universal be- 
nevolence, 267. 272, 274, 278, 
282, 286, 287; Wordsworth, 
on. 300. (See also Shaftes- 
bury, Rousseau, Animals, Re- 
volution.) 

Bloomfield, Robert. 81, 249. 

Browne, Isaac Hawkins. 387, 393, 
395. 

Bruce, Michael, Daphnis, 84; 
Fountain, To a, 84; Lochleven, 
51, 65, 71, 82, 93, 158, 163, 241, 
354. 377, 378; Lochleven No 
More, 78; Spring, Elegy to, 
105; Wordsworth, 75, 87, 92, 
94. 

Burns, Robert, Address to Beel- 
zebub, 135 ; Auld Lang Syne, 
59, 83; Ayr, 77; Birth of a 
Posthumous Child, 40, 42; 
Bonie Jean, 103 ; Bonnie Lad 
That's Far Awa, 40; Cotter's 
Saturday - Night, 131 — 134, 
158, 159; Cruel are the Par- 
ents, 103; Miss Cruickshank, 
40, 42; Death and Dr. Horn- 
book, 196 ; Iventory, 241 ; Man 
Was Made to Mourn, 134; 
Michie, Epitaph on William, 
197; Mouse, To a, 105, 282; 
Rantin Dog, the Daddie O't, 
40; Rose-Bud By My Early 



398 



INDEX 



Walk, 40, 41 ; Ruined Farmer, 
130; Sensibility, 102; Stella, 
Elegy on, 79; Welcome to his 
Love-begotten Daughter, 39; 
Wounded Hare, 105 ;— Blake, 
and, 266, 281, 283; predeces- 
sors, and, 305. 
Byrom, John, 175, 176, 197, 211, 
256. 

Cawthorn, James, 31, 176 — 177, 
192, 210, 213, 243. 

Chap books, 236ff., 243ff. 

Chatterton, Thomas, 63, 77, 112, 
154, 163, 194, 208, 243. 

Children in the Wood, 119, 234 — 
238, 246. 

Churchill, Charles, 182, 190. 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 49, 90, 
103, 104, 136, 288, 308, 309. 314, 
320, 350, 351. 356. 

Collins, William, 84, 89—90, 91, 
93, 113—114, 233, 239. 

Cooper, John Gilbert, 22, 91, 162, 
232, 327. 

Cotton, Nathaniel, 97, 101, 232, 
280. 

Cowper, William, Anne Bodham, 
To My Cousin, 2, 3; Blake, 
and, 266; Conversation, 185, 
246; Dyer, and, 140, 141, 158; 
Error, The Progress of, 208; 
Hope, 31, 208 ; John Gilpin, 63 ; 
Mother's Picture, On the Re- 
ceipt of My, 43, 44, 347; Ode, 
129 ; On Observing some 
Names, 15; Retirement, 56, 
390; Table Talk, 31, 180; Task, 
The, 55, 126, 128, 149, 370; 
Thurlow, Edward, 81 ; Tiroci- 



nium, 161, 174, 181, 184, 185— 
189, 192, 255, 271; Truth, 127; 
Valediction, 208 ; Warren 
Hastings, To, 81 ; Wordsworth, 
and, 53, 71, 72. 106, 129, 130, 
Z72', Lines on a Sleeping In- 
fant, 304. 
Crabbe, George, Borough, The, 
204, 205 ; Parish Register, The, 
148, 149, 154, 195, 204, 246, 
250, 299; Village, The, 64, 77, 
112. 140, 146, 147, 148, 150, 
151, 158, 159, 271, 367, Z7Z, 374. 

Denton, Thomas, 387—389. 
Dyer, John, 2, 56. 139—144, 146, 
147, 152, 153, 158, 159, 190. 

Flogging, 208fif. 

Gay, John, 13, 22—23, 110, 139, 
197, 234, 235—236, 237, 239. 
355, Z7Z. 374. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 65, 77, 112, 
144—146, 158, 184, 190. 193, 
202—203, 204, 241, 251, 253, 
254. 

Graeme, James, 71, 7Z, 81 — 82, 
109, 178, 210. 

Grahame, James, 160, 233, 366 — 
367, 371—372. 

Gray, Thomas, 31, 51, 59, 66—67, 
77. 93, 94, 191, 234, 284, 325, 
2>Z7, 338, 381—382, 393. 

Hamilton, William, 115—116. 
Harte, Walter, 27—28. 
Headley, Henry, 118—119, 271. 
Henley, William, 47. 
Hill, Aaron, 4, 5, 24, 25, 122—123. 



INDEX 



399 



Hoyland, Francis. 32—33, 39, 51, 
54, 69. 

Industrial Revolution, 2, 99ff., 

138ff., 156, 160. 
Industry, The House of, 142ff., 

374. 

Jago, Richard, 71, 72,, 82, 182— 

183, 201, 205, 329—330. 
Jerningham, Edward, Z7 — 38, 

119—121, 271. 
Johnson, Samuel, 78, 175, 180, 

184, 207, 210, 223, 233, 234, 248, 
249, 251, 253. 

Johnson, S., (of Shrewsbury), 
211—216. 

Lamb, Charles and Mary, 50, 54, 
57, 62, 77, 88—89, 127, 203, 
234, 238, 260, 261, 264, 280, 
288, 318, 351, Z7Z. 

Langhorne, John, Eden, To the, 
92, 394; Enlargement of the 
Mind, 15, 291 ; Genius of West- 
moreland, 92; Irwan, Farewell 
Hymn to the Valley of, 92; 
Owen of Carron, 23; Ponte- 
fract Castle, Ruins of, 330; 
Wordsworth, and, 91, 92, 93, 
355, 394. 

Lloyd, Robert, 15, 29—30, 177— 
178, 183. 190, 194, 205. 

Locke, John, 1, 25, Z7, 144, 161, 
165, 166, 167, 169, 171, 181, 
184, 223. 

Logan, John, 78, 87. 

Lovibond, Edward, 31, 51, 69 — 
70, 7S, 90, 103—104, 109, 205— 
207, 217, 281, 282, 328, 254, 278. 



Lyttleton, Lord, 2)2,, 103, 234 . 

Mackenzie. Henry, 111, 144, 233, 

241, 381. 
Mason, William. 38, 61, 91, 103, 

163, 210, 238. 
Mickle, William Julius, 5. 60, 

61, 62, 65, 66, 70, 72, 72, 79, 

86, 150, 163, 240. 354. 
More, Hannah, 137, 150ff., 156— 

157, 191, 361. 
Mother Goose, 254. 

Native fields, 76 — 96, (see also 
Akenside, Bruce, Collins, 
Wordsworth) . 

Newberry, John, 173, 219, 251ff., 
264, 266, 351. 

Philips, Ambrose, 19—22. 

Philipps, John, 11—12, 15, 51, 
229. 

Pope, Alexander, 19, 189. 327; 
Dunciad, The, 161, 164—166, 
169, 172, 174, 175, 205, 209, 
210, 211, 214, 216, 270, 271; 
Essay on Man, 12, 391; Mes- 
siah, The, 12 — 13; his mother, 
25, 44. 

Pre-Existence, A Poem in Imi- 
tation of Milton, 277, 384—386, 
389. 

Prior, Matthew, 2, 15, 16—18, 41, 
44, 49, 176, 190, 191. 192, 220, 
299, 308, 310, 311, 320, 378, 
387, 389—392. 

Revolution, French, The, 47, 99, 
134—136, 151, 270, 272, 274, 
276, 291, 243ff. 



400 



INDEX 



Robinson Crusoe, 246, 247, 249 — 
250, 253. 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 1, 3, 34, 
48, 87, 99, 103, 107, 120, 161, 
171, 173, 207, 212, 213, 214, 215, 
216, 250, 255, 256, 260, 261, 270, 
271, 277, 278, 346, 348, 349, 
350, 358. 

Russell, Thomas, 27, 128-129. 



396; his mother, 26—27, 43; 
Spring, 25, 279; Summer, 52, 
55, 57, 58, 110, 115; Autumn, 
110; Winter, 60, 102, 110—111, 
239; Liberty, 112—113, 164. 

Thompson, William, 13, 390. 

Tickell, Thomas, 108—109, 190, 
234, 239—240, 299—300; Horn- 
Book, 192—193, 197. 



Savage, Richard, 114 — 115. 
Scott, John, (of Amwell), 20, 34, 

51, 52, 54, 56, 67-68, 75, 77, 

89, 103, 109, 116, 129—130, 140, 

141. 
Scott, Sir Walter, 147, 292, 300, 

301. 
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley 

Cooper, Earl of, 1, 98—99, 105, 

106, 129, 184, 278, 291, 298, 346, 

358, 378, 396; (See also Blake, 

Wordsworth). 
Shaw, Cuthbert, 34—36, 39, 103. 
Shenstone, William, 23, 51, 61, 

62, 63, 68, 79, 82, 182, 196, 197— 

202, 203, 204, 234, 282, 372. 
Somerville, William, 30, 61, 66, 

73, 80, 100, 101—102, 104, 116, 

209, 210, 249, 256. 
Southey, Robert, 79, 82—83, 87— 

88, 95, 106—107, 118, 136—138, 

158, 290, 299, 344. 
Swifti)[oJI)than. 28, 29, 63, 80— 

81, 89,'T75rid' 9^' ^4, 235, 
247, 249, 372. ^ ^ 

Thomson, James, 39, 51, 67, 91, 
92, 94, 97, 98, 100, 106, 117, 

159, 241, 269, 276, 278, 281, 291, 
312, 314, 317, 327, 343, 344, 381, 



Warton, Joseph, Fashion, 37, 
100, 103; Library, 109; To 
Fancy, 330. 

Warton, Thomas, 47, 75, 91, 178, 
234, 308, 377. 

Watts, Isaac, 3, 42, 101, 216—217, 
219, 220—230, 257, 258, 261, 
264, 266, 267, 287, 294, 308. 

West, Gilbert, Education, 62 
166—169, 174, 189, 208, 271 

White, H. K., 51, 54, 64—65, 68, 
119, 121—122, 156, 195, 199, 
203—204, 238, 242—243, 246, 
249, 325, 326, 328—329. 

Whitehead, William, 28, 109, 207. 

Winchilsea, Lady, 23—24. 

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 46, 292, 
304, 305, 307, 308, 312, 329, 
345, 358, 359, 375, 378. 

Wordsworth, William, children, 
age of, 3, 4, 5 ; and Blake, 262, 
299, 300, 301, 302, 339, 340, 349, 
351, 357; benevolence, 103, 130, 
276, 344ff. ; baptism, 307 ; birth, 
38, 44ff., 306—307; books and 
reading, 234, 237, 239, 244, 247, 
248, 250, 251, 260, 261, 349ff.; 
chap books, 244; childhood the 
foundation of his philosophy, 
164, 302, 314, 344, 382ff. ; child- 



[NDEX 



401 



less marriage, 23 ; children of 
the poor. 52, 56. 97, 137, 139, 
144, 147, 151, 306, 313, 317. 
343ff, (See also Industry) ; 
Children in the Wood, 234, 
237; Christmas, 306. 323, 324; 
city children, 314 — 324; con- 
firmation, 5. 6; education, 62, 
69, 72f{., 191, 216, 217. 260, 261, 
299, 300, 302, 348, 361. 368, 
369; grandchildren, 64, 303; 
graves of children, 325 — 327; 
happiness of children, 313 ; 
Hawkeshead, 55. 62, 151, 164, 
303, 32Z 325, 334, 354; House 
of Industry, 144, 160; Immor- 
tality, 341, 374ff., see also Ode; 
Industry, 361—374; Jack the 
Giant-Killer, 322, 352; lulla- 
bies, 42, 43, 308 (see also Blake, 
Watts, Dorothy Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, and T. Warton) ; 
medieval elements, 327 — 331 ; 
model child, 350; mother, 43, 
44, 346, 347, 352, 353, 356, see 
also Cowper, Langhorne, and 
Thomson; native fields, 51, 
59ff., 76, 78, 79, 89, 91, 94, 96, 
318, 342. 343, 344, 376ff., 382; 
naturalistic supernaturalism, 
334-338, see also 74, 76; poet 
of childhood. 299, 302 ; prayers. 



309; Revolution, French, 47, 
343ff., 369. see also Blake, 
Rousseau, Shaftesbury; Rous- 
seau, 87, 346, 348, 349, 350, 
358, see also Rousseau ; Shaf- 
tesbury, 346, 358, 378, 396, see 
also Shaftesbury. — Alice Fell, 
372—373; Anecdote for Fath- 
ers, 302, 358; Excursion, 3. 23, 
47, 62, 73, 137. 160, 217, 237, 
250, 302, 303, 306fif. ; Fidelity, 
282; Foresight, 358—360, see 
also 53 ; Idle Shepherd-Boys, 
56 — 57; Kitten and the Falling 
Leaves, 282. 309. 310; Lucy, 
343, 364; Michael, 3, 4, 44, 45, 
56. 303, 341, 342, 345; Oak and 
the Broom, 53; Ode, Intima- 
tions, 78, 148, 291, 300, 302. 314, 
340, 341, 357, 374—396, see 
also Immortality ; Pet Lamb, 
282; Prelude, 4,'59— 61, 62, 65, 
69, 72—76, 78, 87, 89, 91, 94. 96, 
130, 234, 244, 248, 299. 300. 301, 
302, 303ff., 348—357; Spar- 
rozv's Nest, 83, 84; Stepping- 
Stones, 59; There was a hoy, 
5; To H. C, 47—49; JVe are 
Seven, 286, 302. 338—341. 

Young. Edward. 232. 233. 380— 
381. 387. 389. 



^. 



VITA 

I was born on January 19, 1883, ^" Wilson, Minnesota. 
My father, who was at that time a clergyman, was born in 
Columbus, Wisconsin, and my mother (nee Gise) in Al- 
bany, New York. After attending the public schools, I 
studied in the classical course at Northwestern College, re- 
ceiving the A. B. in 1904. From 1904 to 1906 I attended 
lectures in the Graduate School at Harvard University under 
Professors G. P. Baker, G. L. Kittredge, F. N. Robinson, W. 
H. Schofield, and Barrett Wendell, receiving the A. M. in 
June, 1906. From 1906 to 1919 I taught in the Department 
of English, Syracuse University, Syracuse, N. Y. I was in- 
structor from 1906 to 1909, Assistant Professor from 1909 
to 1912, Associate Professor from 1912 to 1915, and Pro- 
fessor of English from 191 5 to 19 19. In the summer of 
1919 and during the academic year 1919 — 11920 I was on 
leave of absence as a resident student in the Graduate School 
of Columbia University. During this time I attended the 
Seminar conducted by Professor A. H. Thorndike, and also 
lectures under Professors C. S. Baldwin, G. P. Krapp, W. 
W. Lawrence, A. H. Thorndike, W. P. Trent, and E. H. 
Wright. In the spring of 1920 I resigned my professor- 
ship at Syracuse University, and became an Instructor in 
English in University Extension, Columbia University. I 
have published a syllabus for use in a freshman course in 
English composition, another for a sophomore course in 
English literature, and have written two articles for the 
Bulletin of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering 
Education. 



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